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Title:      The House of the Arrow
Author:     A. E. W. Mason
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Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          November 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2007

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Title:      The House of the Arrow
Author:     A. E. W. Mason






I: LETTERS OF MARK

MESSRS. FROBISHER & HASLITT, the solicitors on the east side of Russell
Square, counted amongst their clients a great many who had undertakings
established in France; and the firm was very proud of this branch of its
business.

"It gives us a place in history," Mr. Jeremy Haslitt used to say. "For it
dates from the year 1806, when Mr. James Frobisher, then our very
energetic senior partner, organized the escape of hundreds of British
subjects who were detained in France by the edict of the first Napoleon.
The firm received the thanks of His Majesty's Government and has been
fortunate enough to retain the connection thus made. I look after that
side of our affairs myself."

Mr. Haslitt's daily batch of letters, therefore, contained as a rule a
fair number bearing the dark-blue stamp of France upon their envelopes.
On this morning of early April, however, there was only one. It was
addressed in a spidery, uncontrolled hand with which Mr. Haslitt was
unfamiliar. But it bore the postmark of Dijon, and Mr. Haslitt tore it
open rather quickly. He had a client in Dijon, a widow, Mrs. Harlowe, of
whose health he had had bad reports. The letter was certainly written
from her house, La Maison Grenelle, but not by her. He turned to the
signature.

"Waberski?" he said, with a frown. "Boris Waberski?" And then, as he
identified his correspondent, "Oh, yes, yes."

He sat down in his chair and read. The first part of the letter was
merely flowers and compliments, but half-way down the second page its
object was made clear as glass. It was five hundred pounds. Old Mr.
Haslitt smiled and read on, keeping up, whilst he read, a one-sided
conversation with the writer.

"I have a great necessity of that money," wrote Boris, "and--"

"I am quite sure of that," said Mr. Haslitt.

"My beloved sister, Jeanne-Marie--" the letter continued.

"Sister-in-law," Mr. Haslitt corrected.

"-- cannot live for long, in spite of all the care and attention I give to
her," Boris Waberski went on. "She has left me, as no doubt you know, a
large share of her fortune. Already, then, it is mine--yes? One may say
so and be favourably understood. We must look at the facts with the eyes.
Expedite me, then, by the recommended post a little of what is mine and
agree my distinguished salutations."

Haslitt's smile became a broad grin. He had in one of his tin boxes a
copy of the will of Jeanne-Marie Harlowe drawn up in due form by her
French notary at Dijon, by which every farthing she possessed was
bequeathed without condition to her husband's niece and adopted daughter,
Betty Harlowe. Jeremy Haslitt almost destroyed that letter. He folded it;
his fingers twitched at it; there was already actually a tear at the
edges of the sheets when he changed his mind.

"No," he said to himself. "No! With the Boris Waberskis one never knows,"
and he locked the letter away on a ledge of his private safe.

He was very glad that he had when three weeks later he read, in the
obituary column of The Times, the announcement of Mrs. Harlowe's death,
and received a big card with a very deep black border in the French style
from Betty Harlowe inviting him to the funeral at Dijon. The invitation
was merely formal. He could hardly have reached Dijon in time for the
ceremony had he started off at that instant. He contented himself with
writing a few lines of sincere condolence to the girl, and a letter to
the French notary in which he placed the services of the firm at Betty's
disposal. Then he waited.

"I shall hear again from little Boris," he said, and he heard within the
week. The handwriting was more spidery and uncontrolled than ever;
hysteria and indignation had played havoc with Waberski's English; also
he had doubled his demand.

"It is outside belief," he wrote. "Nothing has she left to her so
attentive brother. There is something here I do not much like. It must be
one thousand pounds now, by the recommended post. 'You have always had
the world against you, my poor Boris,' she say with the tears all big in
her dear eyes. 'But I make all right for you in my will.' And now
nothing! I speak, of course, to my niece--ah, that hard one! She snap
her the fingers at me! Is that a behaviour? One thousand pounds, mister!
Otherwise there will be awkwardnesses! Yes! People do not snap them the
fingers at Boris Waberski without the payment. So one thousand pounds by
the recommended post or awkwardnesses"; and this time Boris Waberski did
not invite Mr. Haslitt to agree any salutations, distinguished or
otherwise, but simply signed his name with a straggling pen which shot
all over the sheet.

Mr. Haslitt did not smile over this letter. He rubbed the palms of his
hands softly together.

"Then we shall have to make some awkwardnesses too," he said hastily, and
he locked this second letter away with the first. But Mr. Haslitt found
it a little difficult to settle to his work. There was that girl out
there in the big house at Dijon and no one of her race near her! He got
up from his chair abruptly and crossed the corridor to the offices of his
junior partner.

"Jim, you were at Monte Carlo this winter," he said.

"For a week," answered Jim Frobisher.

"I think I asked you to call on a client of ours who has a villa
there--Mrs. Harlowe."

Jim Frobisher nodded. "I did. But Mrs. Harlowe was ill. There was a
niece, but she was out."

"You saw no one, then?" Jeremy Haslitt asked.

"No, that's wrong," Jim corrected. "I saw a strange creature who came to
the door to make Mrs. Harlowe's excuses--a Russian."

"Boris Waberski," said Mr. Haslitt.

"That's the name."

Mr. Haslitt sat down in a chair.

"Tell me about him, Jim."

Jim Frobisher stared at nothing for a few moments. He was a young man of
twenty-six who had only during this last year succeeded to his
partnership. Though quick enough when action was imperative, he was
naturally deliberate in his estimates of other people's characters; and a
certain awe he had of old Jeremy Haslitt doubled that natural
deliberation in any matters of the firm's business. He answered at
length.

"He is a tall, shambling fellow with a shock of grey hair standing up
like wires above a narrow forehead and a pair of wild eyes. He made me
think of a marionette whose limbs have not been properly strung. I should
imagine that he was rather extravagant and emotional. He kept twitching
at his moustache with very long, tobacco-stained fingers. The sort of
man who might go off at the deep end at any moment."

Mr. Haslitt smiled. "That's just what I thought."

"Is he giving you any trouble?" asked Jim.

"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt. "But Mrs. Harlowe is dead, and I think it
very likely that he will. Did he play at the tables?"

"Yes, rather high," said Jim. "I suppose that he lived on Mrs. Harlowe."

"I suppose so," said Mr. Haslitt, and he sat for a little while in
silence. Then: "It's a pity you didn't see Betty Harlowe. I stopped at
Dijon once on my way to the South of France five years ago when Simon
Harlowe, the husband, was alive. Betty was then a long-legged slip of a
girl in black silk stockings with a pale, clear face and dark hair and
big eyes--rather beautiful." Mr. Haslitt moved in his chair
uncomfortably. That old house with its great garden of chestnuts and
sycamores and that girl alone in it with an aggrieved and half-crazed
man thinking out awkwardnesses for her--Mr. Haslitt did not like the
picture!

"Jim," he said suddenly, "could you arrange your work so that you could
get away at short notice, if it becomes advisable?"

Jim looked up in surprise. Excursions and alarms, as the old stage
directions have it, were not recognized as a rule by the firm of
Frobisher & Haslitt. If its furniture was dingy, its methods were
stately; clients might be urgent, but haste and hurry were words for
which the firm had no use. No doubt, somewhere round the corner, there
would be an attorney who understood them. Yet here was Mr. Haslitt
himself, with his white hair and his curious round face, half-babyish,
half-supremely intelligent, actually advocating that his junior partner
should be prepared to skip to the Continent at a word.

"No doubt I could," said Jim, and Mr. Haslitt looked him over with
approbation.

Jim Frobisher had an unusual quality of which his acquaintances, even his
friends, knew only the outward signs. He was a solitary person. Very few
people up till now had mattered to him at all, and even those he could do
without. It was his passion to feel that his life and the means of his
life did not depend upon the purchased skill of other people; and he had
spent the spare months of his life in the fulfilment of his passion. A
half-decked sailing-boat which one man could handle, an ice-axe, a
rifle, an inexhaustible volume or two like The Ring and the Book--these
with the stars and his own thoughts had been his companions on many
lonely expeditions; and in consequence he had acquired a queer little
look of aloofness which made him at once noticeable amongst his fellows.
A misleading look, since it encouraged a confidence for which there might
not be sufficient justification. It was just this look which persuaded
Mr. Haslitt now. "This is the very man to deal with creatures like Boris
Waberski," he thought, but he did not say so aloud.

What he did say was: "It may not be necessary after all. Betty Harlowe
has a French lawyer. No doubt he is adequate. Besides"--and he smiled as
he recollected a phrase in Waberski's second letter--"Betty seems very
capable of looking after herself. We shall see."

He went back to his own office, and for a week he heard no more from
Dijon. His anxiety, indeed, was almost forgotten when suddenly startling
news arrived and by the most unexpected channel.

Jim Frobisher brought it. He broke into Mr. Haslitt's office at the
sacred moment when the senior partner was dictating to a clerk the
answers to his morning letters.

"Sir!" cried Jim, and stopped short at the sight of the clerk. Mr.
Haslitt took a quick look at his young partner's face and said: "We will
resume these answers, Godfrey, later on."

The clerk took his shorthand notebook out of the room, and Mr. Haslitt
turned to Jim Frobisher.

"Now, what's your bad news, Jim?"

Jim blurted it out. "Waberski accuses Betty Harlowe of murder."

"What!"

Mr. Haslitt sprang to his feet. Jim Frobisher could not have said whether
incredulity or anger had the upper hand with the old man, the one so
creased his forehead, the other so blazed in his eyes.

"Little Betty Harlowe!" he said in a wondering voice.

"Yes. Waberski has laid a formal charge with the Prefect of Police at
Dijon. He accuses Betty of poisoning Mrs. Harlowe on the night of April
the 27th."

"But Betty's not arrested?" Mr. Haslitt exclaimed.

"No, but she's under surveillance."

Mr. Haslitt sat heavily down in his arm-chair at his table.
Extravagant! Uncontrolled! These were very mild epithets for Boris
Waberski. Here was a devilish malignity at work in the rogue, a passion
for revenge just as mean as could be imagined.

"How do you know all this, Jim?" he asked suddenly.

"I have had a letter this morning from Dijon."

"You?" exclaimed Mr. Haslitt, and the question caught hold of Jim
Frobisher and plunged him too among perplexities. In the first shock of
the news, the monstrous fact of the accusation had driven everything else
out of his head. Now he asked himself why, after all, had the news come
to him and not to the partner who had the Harlowe estate in his charge.

"Yes, it is strange," he replied. "And here's another queer thing. The
letter doesn't come from Betty Harlowe, but from a friend, a companion of
hers, Ann Upcott."

Mr. Haslitt was a little relieved.

"Betty had a friend with her, then? That's a good thing." He reached out
his hand across the table. "Let me read the letter, Jim."

Frobisher had been carrying it in his hand, and he gave it now to Jeremy
Haslitt. It was a letter of many sheets, and Jeremy let the edges slip
and nicker under the ball of his thumb.

"Have I got to read all this?" he said ruefully, and he set himself to
his task. Boris Waberski had first of all accused Betty to her face.
Betty had contemptuously refused to answer the charge, and Waberski had
gone straight off to the Prefect of Police. He had returned in an hour's
time, wildly gesticulating and talking aloud to himself. He had actually
asked Ann Upcott to back him up. Then he had packed his bags and retired
to an hotel in the town. The story was set out in detail, with quotations
from Waberski's violent, crazy talk; and as the old man read, Jim
Frobisher became more and more uneasy, more and more troubled.

He was sitting by the tall, broad window which looked out upon the
square, expecting some explosion of wrath and contempt. But he saw
anxiety peep out of Mr. Haslitt's face and stay there as he read. More
than once he stopped altogether in his reading, like a man seeking to
remember or perhaps to discover.

"But the whole thing's as clear as daylight," Jim said to himself
impatiently. And yet--and yet--Mr. Haslitt had sat in that arm-chair
during the better part of the day, during the better part of thirty
years. How many men and women during those years had crossed the roadway
below this window and crept into this quiet oblong room with their
grievances, their calamities, their confessions? And had passed out
again, each one contributing his little to complete the old man's
knowledge and sharpen the edge of his wit? Then, if Mr. Haslitt was
troubled, there was something in that letter, or some mission from it,
which he himself in his novitiate had overlooked. He began to read it
over again in his mind to the best of his recollection, but he had not
got far before Mr. Haslitt put the letter down.

"Surely, sir," cried Jim, "it's an obvious case of blackmail."

Mr. Haslitt awoke with a little shake of his shoulders.

"Blackmail? Oh! that of course, Jim."

Mr. Haslitt got up and unlocked his safe. He took from it the two
Waberski letters and brought them across the room to Jim. "Here's the
evidence, as damning as anyone could wish."

Jim read the letters through and uttered a little cry of delight. "The
rogue has delivered himself over to us."

"Yes," said Mr. Haslitt.

But to him, at all events, that was not enough; he was still looking
through the lines of the letter for something beyond, which he could not
find.

"Then what's troubling you?" asked Frobisher.

Mr. Haslitt took his stand upon the worn hearthrug with his back towards
the fire. "This, Jim," and he began to expound. "In ninety-five of
these cases out of a hundred, there is something else, something behind
the actual charge, which isn't mentioned, but on which the blackmailer is
really banking. As a rule it's some shameful little secret, some blot on
the family honour, which any sort of public trial would bring to light.
And there must be something of that kind here. The more preposterous
Waberski's accusation is, the more certain it is that he knows something
to the discredit of the Harlowe name, which any Harlowe would wish to
keep dark. Only, I haven't an idea what the wretched thing can be!"

"It might be some trifle," Jim suggested, "which a crazy person like
Waberski would exaggerate."

"Yes," Mr. Haslitt agreed. "That happens. A man brooding over imagined
wrongs, and flighty and extravagant besides--yes, that might well be,
Jim." Jeremy Haslitt spoke in a more cheerful voice. "Let us see exactly
what we do know of the family," he said, and he pulled up a chair to face
Jim Frobisher and the window. But he had not yet sat down in it, when
there came a discreet knock upon the door, and a clerk entered to
announce a visitor.

"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt before the name of the visitor had been
mentioned.

"Very good, sir," said the clerk, and he retired. The firm of Frobisher &
Haslitt conducted its business in that way. It was the real thing as a
firm of solicitors, and clients who didn't like its methods were very
welcome to take their affairs to the attorney round the corner. Just as
people who go to the real thing in the line of tailors must put up with
the particular style in which he cuts their clothes.

Mr. Haslitt turned back to Jim. "Let us see what we know," he said, and
he sat down in the chair.

II: A CRY FOR HELP

"SIMON HARLOWE," he began, "was the owner of the famous Clos du Prince
vineyards on the Cote-d'Or to the east of Dijon. He had an estate in
Norfolk, this big house, the Maison Grenelle in Dijon, and a villa at
Monte Carlo. But he spent most of his time in Dijon, where at the age of
forty-five he married a French lady, Jeanne-Marie Raviart. There was,
I believe, quite a little romance about the affair. Jeanne-Marie was
married and separated from her husband, and Simon Harlowe waited, I
think, for ten years until the husband Raviart died."

Jim Frobisher moved quickly and Mr. Haslitt, who seemed to be reading of
this history in the pattern of the carpet, looked up.

"Yes, I see what you mean," he said, replying to Jim's movement. "Yes,
there might have been some sort of affair between those two before they
were free to marry. But nowadays, my dear Jim! Opinion takes a more human
view than it did in my youth. Besides, don't you see, this little secret,
to be of any value to Boris Waberski, must be near enough to Betty
Harlowe--I don't say to affect her if published, but to make Waberski
think that she would hate to have it published. Now Betty Harlowe doesn't
come into the picture at all until two years after Simon and Jeanne-Marie
were married, when it became clear that they were not likely to
have any children. No, the love-affairs of Simon Harlowe are
sufficiently remote for us to leave them aside."

Jim Frobisher accepted the demolition of his idea with a flush of shame.
"I was a fool to think of it," he said.

"Not a bit," replied Mr. Haslitt cheerfully. "Let us look at every
possibility. That's the only way which will help us to get a glimpse of
the truth. I resume, then. Simon Harlowe was a collector. Yes, he had a
passion for collecting and a very catholic one. His one sitting-room at
the Maison Grenelle was a perfect treasure-house, not only of beautiful
things, but of out-of-the-way things too. He liked to live amongst
them and do his work amongst them. His married life did not last long.
For he died five years ago at the age of fifty-one."

Mr. Haslitt's eyes once more searched for recollections amongst the
convolutions of the carpet.

"That's really about all I know of him. He was a pleasant fellow enough,
but not very sociable. No, there's nothing to light a candle for us
there, I am afraid."

Mr. Haslitt turned his thoughts to the widow.

"Jeanne-Marie Harlowe," he said. "It's extraordinary how little I know
about her, now I come to count it up. Natural too, though. For she sold
the Norfolk estate and has since passed her whole time between Monte
Carlo and Dijon and--oh yes--a little summer-house on the Cote-d'Or
amongst her vineyards."

"She was left rich, I suppose?" Frobisher asked.

"Very well off, at all events," Mr. Haslitt replied. "The Clos du Prince
Burgundy has a fine reputation, but there's not a great deal of it."

"Did she come to England ever?"

"Never," said Mr. Haslitt. "She was content, it seems, with Dijon, though
to my mind the smaller provincial towns of France are dull enough to make
one scream. However, she was used to it, and then her heart began to
trouble her, and for the last two years she has been an invalid. There's
nothing to help us there." And Mr. Haslitt looked across to Jim for
confirmation.

"Nothing," said Jim.

"Then we are only left the child, Betty Harlowe, and--oh yes, your
correspondent, your voluminous correspondent, Ann Upcott. Who is she,
Jim? Where did she spring from? How does she find herself in the Maison
Grenelle? Come, confess, young man," and Mr. Haslitt archly looked at his
junior partner. "Why should Boris Waberski expect her support?"

Jim Frobisher threw his arms wide. "I haven't an idea," he said. "I have
never seen her. I have never heard of her. I never knew of her existence
until that letter came this morning with her name signed at the end of
it."

Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing his
folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the letter.

"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,' she
writes. She doesn't address the firm at all"; and he waited, looking at
Jim, expecting him to withdraw his denial.

Jim, however, only shook his head.

"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or tail
of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the truth, so
utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should Ann Upcott
write to me? I have been asking myself that question for the last half-hour.
And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who have had her affairs
in your care?"

"Ah!"

That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face took a
livelier expression.

"The answer to that is in Waberski's second, letter. Betty--she snap her
fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge seriously. She
will have left it to the French notary to dispose of it. Yes--I think
that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible, too. The ceremonies
of the law in a foreign country would frighten a stranger, as this girl
is apparently, more than they would Betty Harlowe, who has lived for four
years in the midst of them. So she writes to the first name in the title
of the firm, and writes to him as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man
rubbed his hands together in his satisfaction.

"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an
abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real person. So
she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can take my word for
it."

Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it; he
stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window over
Frobisher's head. "But that doesn't bring us any nearer to finding out
what is Boris Waberski's strong suit, does it? We haven't a clue to it,"
he said ruefully.

To both of the men, indeed, Mr. Haslitt's flat, unillumined narrative of
facts, without a glimpse into the characters of any of the participants
in the little drama, seemed the most unhelpful thing. Yet the whole truth
was written there--the truth not only of Waberski's move, but of all the
strange terrors and mysteries into which the younger of the two men was
now to be plunged. Jim Frobisher was to recognize that, when, shaken to
the soul, he resumed his work in the office. For it was interrupted now.

Mr. Haslitt, looking out of the window over his partner's head, saw a
telegraph-boy come swinging across the square and hesitate in the
roadway below. "I expect that's a telegram for us," he said, with the
hopeful anticipation people in trouble have that something from outside
will happen and set them right.

Jim turned round quickly. The boy was still upon the pavement examining
the numbers of the houses.

"We ought to have a brass plate upon the door," said Jim with a touch of
impatience; and Mr. Haslitt's eyebrows rose half the height of his
forehead towards his thick white hair. He was really distressed by the
Waberski incident, but this suggestion, and from a partner in the firm,
shocked him like a sacrilege.

"My dear boy, what are you thinking of?" he expostulated. "I hope I am
not one of those obstinate old fogies who refuse to march with the times.
We have had, as you know, a telephone instrument recently installed in
the junior clerks' office. I believe that I myself proposed it. But a
brass plate upon the door! My dear Jim! Let us leave that to Harley
Street and Southampton Row! But I see that telegram is for us."

The tiny Mercury with the shako and red cord to his uniform made up his
mind and disappeared into the hall below. The telegram was brought
upstairs and Mr. Haslitt tore it open. He stared at it blankly for a few
seconds, then without a word, but with a very anxious look in his eyes,
he handed it to Jim Frobisher.

Jim Frobisher read: Please,--please, send someone to help me at once.
The Prefect of Police has called in Hanaud, a great detective of the
Surete in Paris. They must think me guilty.--BETTY HARLOWE.

The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like a cry
for help at night coming from a great distance.

"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.

"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently. Jim, however, had
enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was fired, as is the way with
lonely men, by the picture his imagination drew. The little girl, Betty
Harlowe! What age was she? Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been
wandering with all the proud indifference of her sex and youth, until
suddenly she found her feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and
looked about her; and terror came and with it a wild cry for help.

"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly into
the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of false and
cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at in the dark,
to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and ankle? And with
that question he was seized with a great discouragement.

"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country, in
this office," he said regretfully.

"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the Firm
first and last. Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt never went into the Criminal
Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind, was frowned upon. It
is true there was a small special staff, under the leadership of an old
managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor, like an unpresentable
relation in a great house, which did a little of that kind of work. But
it only did it for hereditary clients, and then as a favour.

"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I haven't a
doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is wanted. But
remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't
know."

Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man was
becoming parrot-like--a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of the
girl in Dijon, and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not
"snapping her the fingers" now.

"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a
comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard over a
case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a crime first,
and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This is a case for an
autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man Hanaud"--and he
stopped.

He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.

"Yes--Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and
clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive
recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you had
better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's three-volume
novel, and Betty's telegram"--he gathered the papers together and
enclosed them in a long envelope--"and I shall expect you back again
with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little
Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."

Mr, Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell. "There is someone
waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk who answered it.

The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during
the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old
law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.

"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own
office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with
a reproach.

"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.

But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise,
clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt's mind
was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of
the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.

"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her she
will come of her own accord."

But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run
after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and
head moved with a little jerk and he wrote a word down on a slip of
paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by
a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned
within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher's office.

Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and was
locking up the drawers of his desk.

"Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man Hanaud
before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He's one of our clients."

"Yes," said Frobisher. "I remember him--a rather finicking person in
Grosvenor Square."

"That's the man. He's a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the
friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather scandalous
crime some time ago--at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well, Ricardo will
give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you something about
him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five this afternoon."

"Capital!" said Jim Frobisher.

He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed at
one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third,
and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth. Jim
discounted Mr. Ricardo's enthusiasm, but he got the letter and crossed
the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him that if Hanaud
was a man of such high mark, he would not be free, even at an urgent
call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces in an instant. Jim
broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in the course of the morning
found his way to the Direction of the Surete on the Quai d'Horloge just
behind the Palais de Justice.

"Monsieur Hanaud?" he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and his
letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then, he
thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit with
electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer. There he
rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an hour whilst his
confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang and a policeman in
plain clothes went up to him. One side of the corridor was lined with a
row of doors.

"It is for you, sir," said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one of
the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened his
shoulders and marched in.

III: SERVANTS OF CHANCE

FROBISHER found himself at one end of an oblong room. Opposite to him a
couple of windows looked across the shining river to the big Theatre du
Chatelet. On his left hand was a great table with a few neatly arranged
piles of papers, at which a big, rather heavily built man was sitting.
Frobisher looked at that man as a novice in a duelling held might look at
the master swordsman whom he was committed to fight, with a little shock
of surprise that after all he appeared to be just like other men. Hanaud,
on his side, could not have been said to have looked at Frobisher at all;
yet when he spoke it was obvious that somehow he had looked and to very
good purpose. He rose with a little bow and apologized.

"I have kept you waiting, Mr. Frobisher. My dear friend Mr. Ricardo did
not mention your object in his letter. I had the idea that you came with
the usual wish to see something of our underworld. Now that I see you, I
recognize your wish is more serious."

Hanaud was a man of middle age with a head of thick dark hair, and the
round face and shaven chin of a comedian. A pair of remarkably light eyes
under rather heavy lids alone gave a significance to him, at all events
when seen for the first time in a mood of good-will. He pointed to a
chair.

"Will you take a seat? I will tell you, Mr. Frobisher, I have a very soft
place in my heart for Mr. Ricardo, and a friend of his. These are words,
however. What can I do?"

Jim Frobisher laid down his hat and stick upon a side-table and took
the chair in front of Hanaud's table.

"I am partner in a firm of lawyers which looks after the English
interests of a family in Dijon," he said, and he saw all life and
expression smoothed out of Hanaud's face. A moment ago he had been in the
company of a genial and friendly companion; now he was looking at a
Chinaman.

"Yes?" said Hanaud.

"The family has the name of Harlowe," Jim continued.

"Oho!" said Hanaud.

The ejaculation had no surprise in it, and hardly any interest. Jim,
however, persisted.

"And the surviving member of it, a girl of twenty, Betty Harlowe, has
been charged with murder by a Russian who is connected with the family by
marriage--Boris Waberski."

"Aha!" said Hanaud. "And why do you come to me, Mr. Frobisher?"

Jim stared at the detective. The reason of his coming was obvious.

And yet--he was no longer sure of his ground. Hanaud had pulled open a
drawer in his table and was beginning to put away in it one of his files.

"Yes?" he said, as who should say, "I am listening."

"Well, perhaps I am under a mistake," said Jim. "But my firm has been
informed that you, Monsieur Hanaud, are in charge of the case," he said,
and Hanaud's movements were at once arrested. He sat with the file poised
on the palm of his hand as though he was weighing it, extraordinarily
still; and Jim had a swift impression that he was more than disconcerted.
Then Hanaud put the file into the drawer and closed the drawer softly. As
softly he spoke, but in a sleek voice which to Frobisher's ears had a
note in it which was actually alarming.

"So you have been informed of that, Mr. Frobisher! And in London! And--
yes--this is only Wednesday! News travels very quickly nowadays, to be
sure! Well, your firm is correctly informed. I congratulate you. A point
is scored by you."

Jim Frobisher was quick to seize upon that word. He had thought out upon
his journey in what spirit he might most usefully approach the detective.
Hanaud's bitter little remark gave him the very opening which he needed.

"But, Monsieur Hanaud, I don't take that point of view at all," he argued
earnestly. "I am happy to believe that there is going to be no antagonism
between us. For, if there were, I should assuredly get the worst of it.
No! I am certain that the one wish you have in this matter is to get at
the truth. Whilst my wish is that you should just look upon me as a very
second-rate colleague who by good fortune can give you a little help."

A smile nickered across Hanaud's face and restored it to some of its
geniality.

"It has always been a good rule to lay it on with a trowel," he observed.
"Now, what kind of help, Mr. Frobisher?"

"This kind of help, Monsieur Hanaud. Two letters from Boris Waberski
demanding money, the second one with threats. Both were received by my
firm before he brought this charge, and both of course remain
unanswered."

He took the letters from the long envelope and handed them across the
table to Hanaud, who read them through slowly, mentally translating the
phrases into French as he read. Frobisher watched his face for some
expression of relief or satisfaction. But to his utter disappointment no
such change came; and it was with a deprecating and almost regretful air
that Hanaud turned to him in the end.

"Yes--no doubt these two letters have a certain importance. But we
mustn't exaggerate it. The case is very difficult."

"Difficult!" cried Jim in exasperation. He seemed to be hammering and
hammering in vain against some thick wall of stupidity. Yet this man in
front of him wasn't stupid.

"I can't understand it!" he exclaimed. "Here's the clearest instance of
blackmail that I can imagine--"

"Blackmail's an ugly word, Mr. Frobisher," Hanaud warned him.

"And blackmail's an ugly thing," said Jim. "Come, Monsieur Hanaud, Boris
Waberski lives in France. You will know something about him. You will
have a dossier."

Hanaud pounced upon the word with a little whoop of delight, his face
broke into smiles, he shook a forefinger gleefully at his visitor.

"Ah, ah, ah, ah! A dossier! Yes, I was waiting for that word! The great
legend of the dossiers! You have that charming belief too, Mr. Frobisher.
France and her dossiers! Yes! If her coal-mines fail her, she can
always keep warm by burning her dossiers! The moment you land for the
first time at Calais-boum! your dossier begins, eh? You travel to 
Paris--so! You dine at the Ritz Hotel--so! Afterwards you go where you ought
not to go--so--o--o! And you go back late to the hotel very
uncomfortable because you are quite sure that somewhere in the still
night six little officials with black beards and green-shaded lamps are
writing it all down in your dossier. But--wait!"

He suddenly rose from his chair with his finger to his lips, and his eyes
opened wide. Never was a man so mysterious, so important in his mystery.
He stole on tiptoe, with a lightness of step amazing in so bulky a man,
to the door. Noiselessly and very slowly, with an alert, bright eye
cocked at Frobisher like a bird's, he turned the handle. Then he jerked
the door swiftly inwards towards him. It was the classic detection of the
eavesdropper, seen in a hundred comedies and farces; and carried out with
so excellent a mimicry that Jim, even in this office of the Surete,
almost expected to see a flustered chambermaid sprawl heavily forward on
her knees. He saw nothing, however, but a grimy corridor lit with
artificial light in which men were patiently waiting. Hanaud closed the
door again, with an air of intense relief.

"The Prime Minister had not overheard us. We are safe," he hissed, and he
crept back to Frobisher's side. He stooped and whispered in the ear of
that bewildered man: "I can tell you about those dossiers. They are for
nine-tenths the gossip of the concierge translated into the language of
a policeman who thinks that everybody had better be in prison. Thus, the
concierge says: 'This Mr. Frobisher--on Tuesday he came home at one in
the morning and on Thursday at three in fancy dress'; and in the
policeman's report it becomes, 'Mr. Frobisher is of a loose and excessive
life.' And that goes into your dossier--yes, my friend, just so! But
here in the Surete--never breathe a word of it, or you ruin me!--here
we are like your Miss Betty Harlowe, 'we snap us the fingers at those
dossiers.'"

Jim Frobisher's mind was of the deliberate order. To change from one mood
to another required a progression of ideas. He hardly knew for the moment
whether he was upon his head or his heels. A minute ago Hanaud had been
the grave agent of Justice; without a hint he had leaped to buffoonery,
and with a huge enjoyment. He had become half urchin, half clown. Jim
could almost hear the bells of his cap still tinkling. He simply stared,
and Hanaud with a rueful smile resumed his seat.

"If we work together at Dijon, Monsieur Frobisher," he said with
whimsical regret, "I shall not enjoy myself as I did with my dear little
friend Mr. Ricardo at Aix. No, indeed! Had I made this little pantomime
for him, he would have sat with the eyes popping out of his head. He
would have whispered, 'The Prime Minister comes in the morning to spy
outside your door--oh!' and he would have been thrilled to the marrow of
his bones. But you--you look at me all cold and stony, and you say to
yourself, 'This Hanaud, he is a comic!'"

"No," said Jim earnestly, and Hanaud interrupted the protest with a
laugh.

"It does not matter."

"I am glad," said Jim. "For you just now said something which I am very
anxious you should not withdraw. You held me out a hope that we should
work together."

Hanaud leaned forward with his elbows on his desk. "Listen," he said
genially. "You have been frank and loyal with me. So I relieve your mind.
This Waberski affair--the Prefect at Dijon does not take it very
seriously; neither do I here. It is, of course, a charge of murder, and
that has to be examined with care."

"Of course."

"And equally, of course, there is some little thing behind it," Hanaud
continued, surprising Frobisher with the very words which Mr. Haslitt had
used the day before, though the one spoke in English and the other in
French. "As a lawyer you will know that. Some little unpleasant fact
which is best kept to ourselves. But it is a simple affair, and with
these two letters you have brought me, simpler than ever. We shall ask
Waberski to explain these letters and some other things too, if he can.
He is a type, that Boris Waberski! The body of Madame Harlowe will be
exhumed today and the evidence of the doctors taken, and afterwards, no
doubt, the case will be dismissed and you can deal with Waberski as you
please."

"And that little secret?" asked Jim.

Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.

"No doubt it will come to light. But what does that matter if it only
comes to light in the office of the examining magistrate, and does not
pass beyond the door?"

"Nothing at all," Jim agreed.

"You will see. We are not so alarming after all, and your little client
can put her pretty head upon the pillow without any fear that an
injustice will be done to her."

"Thank you, Monsieur Hanaud!" Jim Frobisher cried warmly. He was
conscious of so great a relief that he himself was surprised by it. He
had been quite captured by his pity for that unknown girl in the big
house, set upon by a crazy rascal and with no champion but another girl
of her own years. "Yes, this is good news to me."

But he had hardly finished speaking before a doubt crept into his mind as
to the sincerity of the man sitting opposite to him. Jim did not mean to
be played and landed like a silly fish, however inexperienced he might
be. He looked at Hanaud and wondered. Was this present geniality of his
any less assumed than his other moods? Jim was unsettled in his estimate
of the detective. One moment a judge, and rather implacable, now an
urchin, now a friend! Which was travesty and which truth? Luckily there
was a test question which Mr. Haslitt had put only yesterday as he looked
out from the window across Russell Square. Jim now repeated it.

"The affair is simple, you say?"

"Of the simplest."

"Then how comes it, Monsieur Hanaud, that the examining judge at Dijon
still finds it necessary to call in to his assistance one of the chiefs
of the Surete in Paris?"

The question was obviously expected, and no less obviously difficult to
answer. Hanaud nodded his head once or twice.

"Yes," he said, and again "Yes," like a man in doubt. He looked at Jim
with appraising eyes. Then with a rush, "I shall tell you everything, and
when I have told you, you will give me your word that you will not betray
my confidence to anyone in this world. For this is serious."

Jim could not doubt Hanaud's sincerity at this moment, nor his
friendliness. They shone in the man like a strong flame.

"I give you my word now," he said, and he reached out his hand across the
table. Hanaud shook it. "I can talk to you freely, then," he answered,
and he produced a little blue bundle of very black cigarettes. "You shall
smoke."

The two men lit their cigarettes and through the blue cloud Hanaud
explained: "I go really to Dijon on quite another matter. This Waberski
affair, it is a pretence! The examining judge who calls me in--see, now,
you have a phrase for him," and Hanaud proudly dropped into English more
or less. "He excuse his face! Yes, that is your expressive idiom. He
excuse his face, and you will see, my friend, that it needs a lot of
excusing, that face of his, yes. Now listen! I get hot when I think of
that examining judge."

He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and, setting his sentence in
order, resumed in French.

"The little towns, my friend, where life is not very gay and people have
the time to be interested in the affairs of their neighbours, have their
own crimes, and perhaps the most pernicious of them all is the crime of
anonymous letters. Suddenly out of a clear sky they will come like a
pestilence, full of vile charges difficult to refute and – who knows?--sometimes perhaps true. For a while these abominations flow into the
letter-boxes and not a word is said. If money is demanded, money is
paid. If it is only sheer wickedness which drives that unknown pen, those
who are lashed by it none the less hold their tongues. But each one
begins to suspect his neighbour. The social life of the town is poisoned.
A great canopy of terror hangs over it, until the postman's knock, a
thing so welcome in the sane life of every day, becomes a thing to shiver
at, and in the end dreadful things happen."

So grave and quiet was the tone which Hanaud used that Jim himself
shivered, even in this room whence he could see the sunlight sparkling on
the river and hear the pleasant murmur of the Paris streets. Above that
murmur he heard the sharp knock of the postman upon the door. He saw a
white face grow whiter still and eyes grow haggard with despair.

"Such a plague has descended upon Dijon," Hanaud continued. "For more
than a year it has raged. The police would not apply to Paris for help.
No, they did not need help, they would solve this pretty problem for
themselves. Yes, but the letters go on and the citizens complain. The
police say, 'Hush! The examining magistrate, he has a clue. Give him
time!' But the letters still go on. Then after a year comes this godsend
of the Waberski affair. At once the Prefect of Police and the magistrate
put their heads together. 'We will send for Hanaud over this simple
affair, and he will find for us the author of the anonymous letters. We
will send for him very privately, and if anyone recognizes him in the
street and cries "There is Hanaud," we can say he is investigating the
Waberski affair. Thus the writer of the letters will not be alarmed and
we--we excuse our faces.' Yes," concluded Hanaud heatedly, "but they
should have sent for me a year ago. They have lost a year."

"And during that year the dreadful things have happened?" asked Jim.

Hanaud nodded angrily. "An old, lonely man who lunches at the hotel and
takes his coffee at the Grande Taverne and does no harm to anyone, he
flings himself in front of the Mediterranean express and is cut to
pieces. A pair of lovers shoot themselves in the Forfit des Moissonieres.
A young girl comes home from a ball; she says good night to her friends
gaily on the doorstep of her house, and in the morning she is found
hanging in her ball dress from a rivet in the wall of her bedroom, whilst
in the hearth there are the burnt fragments of one of these letters. How
many had she received, that poor girl, before this last one drove her to
this madness? Ah, the magistrate. Did I not tell you? He has need to
excuse his face."

Hanaud opened a drawer in his desk and took from it a green cover. "See,
here are two of those precious letters," and removing two typewritten
sheets from the cover he handed them to Frobisher. "Yes," he added, as he
saw the disgust on the reader's face, "those do not make a nice sauce for
your breakfast, do they?"

"They are abominable," said Jim. "I wouldn't have believed-----"He
broke off with a little cry.

"One moment, Monsieur Hanaud!" He bent his head again over the sheets of
paper, comparing them, scrutinizing each sentence. No, there were only
the two errors which he had noticed at once. But what errors they were!
To anyone, at all events, with eyes to see and some luck in the matter of
experience. Why, they limited the area of search at once!

"Monsieur Hanaud, I can give you some more help," he cried
enthusiastically. He did not notice the broad grin of delight which
suddenly transfigured the detective's face. "Help which may lead you very
quickly to the writer of these letters."

"You can?" Hanaud exclaimed. "Give it to me, my young friend. Do not keep
me shaking in excitement. And do not--oh! do not tell me that you have
discovered that the letters were typed upon a Corona machine. For that we
know already."

Jim Frobisher flushed scarlet. That is just what he had noticed with so
much pride in his perspicuity. Where the text of a sentence required a
capital D, there were instead the two noughts with the diagonal line
separating them (thus, %), which "are the symbol of "per cent"; and where
there should have been a capital S lower down the page, there was the
capital S with the transverse lines which stands for dollars. Jim was
familiar with the Corona machine himself, and he had remembered that if
one used by error the stop for figures, instead of the stop for capital
letters, those two mistakes would result. He realized now, with Hanaud's
delighted face in front of him--Hanaud was the urchin now--that the
Surete was certain not to have overlooked those two indications even if
the magistrate at Dijon had; and in a moment he began to laugh too.

"Well, I fairly asked for it, didn't I?" he said as he handed the letter
back. "I said a wise thing to you, Monsieur, when I held it fortunate
that we were not to be on opposite sides."

Hanaud's face lost its urchin look.

"Don't make too much of me, my friend, lest you be disappointed," he said
in all seriousness. "We are the servants of Chance, the very best of us.
Our skill is to seize quickly the hem of her skirt, when it flashes for
the fraction of a second before our eyes."

He replaced the two anonymous letters in the green cover and laid it
again in the drawer. Then he gathered together the two letters which
Boris Waberski had written and gave them back to Jim Frobisher.

"You will want these to produce at Dijon. You will go there today?"

"This afternoon."

"Good!" said Hanaud. "I shall take the night express."

"I can wait for that," said Jim. But Hanaud shook his head.

"It is better that we should not go together, nor stay at the same hotel.
It will very quickly be known in Dijon that you are the English lawyer of
Miss Harlowe, and those in your company will be marked men too. By the
way, how were you informed in London that I, Hanaud, had been put in
charge of this case?"

"We had a telegram," replied Jim.

"Yes? And from whom? I am curious!"

"From Miss Harlowe."

For a moment Hanaud was for the second time in that interview quite
disconcerted. Of that Jim Frobisher could have no doubt. He sat for so
long a time, his cigarette half-way to his lips, a man turned into
stone. Then he laughed rather bitterly, with his eyes alertly turned on
Jim.

"Do you know what I am doing, Monsieur Frobisher?" he asked. "I am
putting to myself a riddle. Answer it if you can! What is the strongest
passion in the world? Avarice? Love? Hatred? None of these things. It is
the passion of one public official to take a great big club and hit his
brother official on the back of the head. It is arranged that I shall go
secretly to Dijon so that I may have some little chance of success. Good!
On Saturday it is so arranged, and already on Monday my colleagues have
so spread the news that Miss Harlowe can telegraph it to you on Tuesday
morning. But that is kind, eh? May I please see the telegram?"

Frobisher took it from the long envelope and handed it to Hanaud, who
received it with a curious eagerness and opened it out on the table in
front of them. He read it very slowly, so slowly that Jim wondered
whether he too heard through the lines of the telegram, as through the
receiver of a telephone, the same piteous cry for help which he himself
had heard. Indeed, when Hanaud raised his face all the bitterness had
gone from it.

"The poor little girl, she is afraid now, eh? The slender fingers, they
do not snap themselves any longer, eh? Well, in a few days we make all
right for her."

"Yes," said Jim stoutly.

"Meanwhile I tear this, do I not?" and Hanaud held up the telegraph form.
"It mentions my name. It will be safe with you, no doubt, but it serves
no purpose. Everything which is torn up here is burnt in the evening. It
is for you to say," and he dangled the telegram before Jim Frobisher's
eyes.

"By all means," said Jim, and Hanaud tore the telegram across. Then he
placed the torn pieces together and tore them through once again and
dropped them into his waste-paper basket. "So! That is done!" he said.
"Now tell me! There is another young English girl in the Maison
Crenelle."

"Ann Upcott," said Jim with a nod.

"Yes, tell me about her."

Jim made the same reply to Hanaud which he had made to Mr. Haslitt.

"I have never seen her in my life. I never heard of her until yesterday."

But whereas Mr. Haslitt had received the answer with amazement, Hanaud
accepted it without comment.

"Then we shall both make the acquaintance of that young lady at Dijon,"
he said with a smile, and he rose from his chair.

Jim Frobisher had a feeling that the interview which had begun badly and
moved on to cordiality was turning back upon itself and ending not too
well. He was conscious of a subtle difference in Hanaud's manner, not a
diminution in his friendliness, but--Jim could find nothing but Hanaud's
own phrase to define the change. He seemed to have caught the hem of the
skirt of Chance as it flickered for a second within his range of vision.
But when it had flickered Jim could not even conjecture.

He picked up his hat and stick. Hanaud was already at the door with his
hand upon the knob.

"Good--bye, Monsieur Frobisher, and I thank you sincerely for your
visit."

"I shall see you in Dijon," said Jim.

"Surely," Hanaud agreed with a smile. "On many occasions. In the office,
perhaps, of the examining magistrate. No doubt in the Maison Grenelle."

But Jim was not satisfied. It was a real collaboration which Hanaud had
appeared a few minutes ago not merely to accept, but even to look forward
to. Now, on the contrary, he was evading it.

"But if we are to work together?" Jim suggested.

"You might want to reach me quickly," Hanaud continued. "Yes. And I might
want to reach you, if not so quickly, still very secretly. Yes." He
turned the question over in his mind. "You will stay at the Maison
Grenelle, I suppose?"

"No," said Jim, and he drew a little comfort from Hanaud's little start
of disappointment. "There will be no need for that," he explained. "Boris
Waberski can attempt nothing more. Those two girls will be safe enough."

"That's true," Hanaud agreed. "You will go, then, to the big hotel in the
Place Darcy. For me I shall stay in one that is more obscure, and not
under my own name. Whatever chance of secrecy is still left for me, that
I shall cling to."

He did not volunteer the name of the obscure hotel or the name under
which he proposed to masquerade, and Jim was careful not to inquire.
Hanaud stood with his hand upon the knob of the door and his eyes
thoughtfully resting upon Frobisher's face.

"I will trust you with a little trick of mine," he said, and a smile
warmed and lit his face to good-humour. "Do you like the pictures? No--yes? For me, I adore them. Wherever I go I snatch an hour for the cinema.
I behold wonderful things and I behold them in the dark--so that while I
watch I can talk quietly with a friend, and when the lights go up we are
both gone, and only our empty Bocks are left to show where we were
sitting. The cinemas--yes! With their audiences which constantly change
and new people coming in who sit plump down upon your lap because they
cannot see an inch beyond their noses, the cinemas are useful. I tell
you. But you will not betray my little secret?"

He ended with a laugh. Jim Frobisher's spirits were quite revived by this
renewal of Hanaud's confidence. He felt with a curious elation that he
had travelled a long way from the sedate dignities of Russell Square. He
could not project in his mind any picture of Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt
meeting a client in a dark corner of a cinema theatre off the Marylebone
Road. Such manoeuvres were not amongst the firm's methods, and Jim began
to find the change exhilarating. Perhaps, after all, Messrs. Frobisher &
Haslitt were a little musty, he reflected. They missed--and he coined a
phrase, he, Jim Frobisher! ... they missed the ozone of police--work.

"Of course I'll keep your secret," he said with a thrill in his voice. "I
should never have thought of so capital a meeting--place."

"Good," said Hanaud. "Then at nine o'clock each night, unless there is
something serious to prevent me, I shall be sitting in the big hall of
the Grande Taverne. The Grande Taverne is at the corner across the square
from the railway station. You can't mistake it. I shall be on the left-hand side of the hall and close up to the screen and at the edge near the
billiard--room. Don't look for me when the lights are raised, and if I
am talking to anyone else, you will avoid me like poison. Is that
understood?"

"Quite," Jim returned.

"And you have now two secrets of mine to keep." Hanaud's face lost its
smile. In some strange way it seemed to sharpen, the light--coloured
eyes became very still and grave. "That also is understood, Monsieur
Frobisher," he said. "For I begin to think that we may both of us see
strange things before we leave Dijon again for Paris."

The moment of gravity passed. With a bow he held open the door. But Jim
Frobisher, as he passed out into the corridor, was once again convinced
that at some definite point in the interview Hanaud had at all events
caught a glimpse of the flickering skirts of Chance, even if he had not
grasped them in his hands.

IV: BETTY HARLOWE

JIM FROBISHER reached Dijon that night at an hour too late for any visit,
but at half-past nine on the next morning he turned with a thrill of
excitement into the little street of Charles-Robert. This street was
bordered upon one side, throughout its length, by a high garden wall
above which great sycamores and chestnut trees rustled friendlily in a
stir of wind. Towards the farther mouth of the street the wall was
broken, first by the end of a house with a florid observation-window of
the Renaissance period which overhung the footway; and again a little
farther on by a pair of elaborate tall iron gates. Before these gates Jim
came to a standstill. He gazed into the courtyard of the Maison Grenelle,
and as he gazed his excitement died away and he felt a trifle ashamed of
it. There seemed so little cause for excitement.

It was a hot, quiet, cloudless morning. On the left-hand side of the
court women-servants were busy in front of a row of offices; at the end
Jim caught glimpses of a chauffeur moving between a couple of cars in a
garage, and heard him whistling gaily as he moved; on the right stretched
the big house, its steep slate roof marked out gaily with huge diamond
patterns of bright yellow, taking in the sunlight through all its open
windows. The hall door under the horizontal glass fan stood open. One of
the iron gates, too, was ajar. Even the sergent-de-ville in his white
trousers out in the small street here seemed to be sheltering from the
sun in the shadow of the high wall rather than exercising any real
vigilance. It was impossible to believe, with all this pleasant evidence
of normal life, that any threat was on that house or upon any of its
inhabitants.

"And indeed there is no threat," Jim reflected. "I have Hanaud's word for
it."

He pushed the gate open and crossed to the front door. An old serving-man informed him that Mademoiselle Harlowe did not receive, but he took
Jim's card nevertheless, and knocked upon a door on the right of the big
square hall. As he knocked, he opened the door; and from his position in
the hall Jim looked right through a library to a window at the end and
saw two figures silhouetted against the window, a man and a girl. The man
was protesting, rather extravagantly both in word and gesture, to Jim's
Britannic mind, the girl laughing--a clear, ringing laugh, with just a
touch of cruelty, at the man's protestations. Jim even caught a word or
two of the protest spoken in French, but with a curiously metallic
accent.

"I have been your slave too long," the man cried, and the girl became
aware that the door was open and that the old man stood inside of it with
a card upon a silver salver. She came quickly forward and took the card.
Jim heard the cry of pleasure, and the girl came running out into the
hall.

"You!" she exclaimed, her eyes shining. "I had no right to expect you so
soon. Oh, thank you!" and she gave him both her hands.

Jim did not need her words to recognize in her the "little girl" of Mr.
Haslitt's description. Little in actual height Betty Harlowe certainly
was not, but she was such a slender trifle of a girl that the epithet
seemed in place. Her hair was dark brown in colour, with a hint of copper
where the light caught it, parted on one side and very neatly dressed
about her small head. The broad forehead and oval face were of a clear
pallor and made vivid the fresh scarlet of her lips; and the large pupils
of her grey eyes gave to her a look which was at once haunting and
wistful. As she held out her hands in a warm gratitude and seized his,
she seemed to him a creature of delicate flame and fragile as fair china.
She looked him over with one swift comprehensive glance and breathed a
little sigh of relief.

"I shall give you all my troubles to carry from now on," she said, with a
smile.

"To be sure. That's what I am here for," he answered. "But don't take me
for anything very choice and particular."

Betty laughed again and, holding him by the sleeve, drew him into the
library.

"Monsieur Espinosa," she said, presenting the stranger to Jim. "He is
from Cataluna, but he spends so much of his life in Dijon that we claim
him as a citizen."

The Catalan bowed and showed a fine set of strong white teeth. "Yes, I
have the honour to represent a great Spanish firm of wine-growers. We
buy the wines here to mix with our better brands, and we sell wine here
to mix with their cheaper ones."

"You mustn't give your trade secrets away to me," Jim replied shortly. He
disliked Espinosa on sight, as they say, and he was at no very great
pains to conceal his dislike. Espinosa was altogether too brilliant a
personage. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with black shining hair
and black shining eyes, a florid complexion, a curled moustache, and
gleaming rings upon his fingers.

"Mr. Frobisher has come from London to see me on quite different
business," Betty interposed.

"Yes?" said the Catalan, a little defiantly, as though he meant to hold
his ground.

"Yes," replied Betty, and she held out her hand to him. Espinosa raised
it reluctantly to his lips and kissed it.

"I shall see you when you return," said Betty, and she walked to the
door.

"If I go away," Espinosa replied stubbornly. "It is not certain,
Mademoiselle Betty, that I shall go"; and with a ceremonious bow to Jim
he walked out of the room; but not so quickly but that Betty glanced
swiftly from one man to the other with keen comparing eyes, and Jim
detected the glance. She closed the door and turned back to Jim with a
friendly little grimace which somehow put him in a good humour. He was
being compared to another man to his advantage, and however modest one
may be, such a comparison promotes a pleasant warmth.

"More trouble, Miss Harlowe," he said with a smile, "but this time the
sort of trouble which you must expect for a good many years to come."

He moved towards her, and they met at one of the two side-windows which
looked out upon the courtyard. Betty sat down in the window-seat.

"I really ought to be grateful to him," she said, "for he made me laugh.
And it seems to me ages since I laughed"; she looked out of the window
and her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

"Oh! don't, please," cried Jim in a voice of trouble.

The smile trembled once more on Betty's lips deliciously. "I won't," she
replied.

"I was so glad to hear you laugh," he continued, "after your unhappy
telegram to my partner and before I told you my good news."

Betty looked up at him eagerly.

"Good news?"

Jim Frobisher took once more from his long envelope the two letters which
Waberski had sent to his firm and handed them to Betty.

"Read them," he said, "and notice the dates."

Betty glanced at the handwriting.

"From Monsieur Boris," she cried, and she settled down in the window-seat to study them. In her short black frock with her slim legs in their
black silk stockings extended and her feet crossed, and her head and
white neck bent over the sheets of Waberski's letters, she looked to Jim
like a girl fresh from school. She was quick enough, however, to
appreciate the value of the letters.

"Of course I always knew that it was money that Monsieur Boris wanted,"
she said. "And when my aunt's will was read and I found that everything
had been left to me, I made up my mind to consult you and make some
arrangement for him."

"There was no obligation upon you," Jim protested. "He wasn't really a
relation at all. He married Mrs. Harlowe's sister, that's all."

"I know," replied Betty, and she laughed. "He always objected to me
because I would call him 'Monsieur Boris' instead of 'uncle.' But I meant
to do something nevertheless. Only he gave me no time. He bullied me
first of all, and I do hate being bullied--don't you, Mr. Frobisher?"

"I do."

Betty looked at the letters again. "That's when I snapped me the fingers
at him, I suppose," she continued, with a little gurgle of delight in the
phrase. "Afterwards he brought this horrible charge against me, and to
have suggested any arrangement would have been to plead guilty."

"You were quite right. It would indeed," Jim agreed cordially.

Up to this moment, a suspicion had been lurking at the back of Jim
Frobisher's mind that this girl had been a trifle hard in her treatment
of Boris Waberski. He was a sponger, a wastrel, with no real claim upon
her, it was true. On the other hand, he had no means of livelihood, and
Mrs. Harlowe, from whom Betty drew her fortune, had been content to
endure and support him. Now, however, the suspicion was laid, the little
blemish upon the girl removed and by her own frankness.

"Then it is all over," Betty said, handing back the letters to Jim with a
sigh of relief. Then she smiled ruefully--"But just for a little while I
was really frightened," she confessed. "You see, I was sent for and
questioned by the examining magistrate. Oh! I wasn't frightened by the
questions, but by him, the man. I've no doubt it's his business to look
severe, but I couldn't help thinking that if anyone looked as
terrifically severe as he did, it must be because he hadn't any brains
and wanted you not to know. And people without brains are always
dangerous, aren't they?"

"Yes, that wasn't encouraging," Jim agreed.

"Then he forbade me to use a motor-car, as if he expected me to run
away. And to crown everything, when I came away from the Palais de
Justice, I met some friends outside who gave me a long list of people who
had been condemned and only found to be innocent when it was too late."

Jim stared at her. "The brutes!" he cried.

"Well, we have all got friends like that," Betty returned
philosophically. "Mine, however, were particularly odious. For they
actually discussed, as a reason of course, why I should engage the very
best advocate, whether, since Mrs. Harlowe had adopted me, the charge
couldn't be made one of matricide. In which case there could be no
pardon, and I must go to the guillotine with a black veil over my head
and naked feet." She saw horror and indignation in Jim Frobisher's face
and she reached out a hand to him.

"Yes. Malice in the provinces is apt to be a little blunt, though"--and
she lifted a slim foot in a shining slipper and contemplated it
whimsically--"I don't imagine that, given the circumstances, I should be
bothering my head much as to whether I was wearing my best shoes and
stockings or none at all."

"I never heard of so abominable a suggestion," cried Jim.

"You can imagine, at all events, that I came home a little rattled,"
continued Betty, "and why I sent off that silly panicky telegram. I would
have recalled it when I rose to the surface again. But it was then too
late. The telegram had--- -" She broke off abruptly with a little rise
of inflexion and a sharp indraw of her breath.

"Who is that?" she asked in a changed voice. She had been speaking
quietly and slowly, with an almost humorous appreciation of the causes of
her fear. Now her question was uttered quickly and anxiety was
predominant in her voice. "Yes, who is that?" she repeated.

A big, heavily-built man sauntering past the great iron gates had
suddenly whipped into the courtyard. A fraction of a second before he was
an idler strolling along the path, now he was already disappearing under
the big glass fan of the porch.

"It's Hanaud," Jim replied, and Betty rose to her feet as though a spring
in her had been released, and stood swaying.

"You have nothing to fear from Hanaud," Jim Frobisher reassured her. "I
have shown him those two letters of Waberski. From first to last he is
your friend. Listen. This is what he said to me only yesterday in Paris."

"Yesterday, in Paris?" Betty asked suddenly.

"Yes, I called upon him at the Surete. These were his words. I remembered
them particularly so that I could repeat them to you just as they were
spoken. 'Your little client can lay her pretty head upon her pillow,
confident that no injustice will be done to her.'"

The bell of the front door shrilled through the house as Jim finished.

"Then why is he in Dijon? Why is he at the door now?" Betty asked
stubbornly.

But that was the one question which Jim must not answer. He had received
a confidence from Hanaud. He had pledged his word not to betray it. For a
little while longer Betty must believe that Waberski's accusation against
her was the true reason of Hanaud's presence in Dijon, and not merely an
excuse for it.

"Hanaud acts under orders," Jim returned. "He is here because he was
bidden to come"; and to his relief the answer sufficed. In truth, Betty's
thoughts were diverted to some problem to which he had not the key.

"So you called upon Monsieur Hanaud in Paris," she said, with a warm
smile. "You have forgotten nothing which could help me." She laid a hand
upon the sill of the open window. "I hope that he felt all the flattery
of my panic-stricken telegram to London."

"He was simply regretful that you should have been so distressed."

"So you showed him the telegram?"

"And he destroyed it. It was my excuse for calling upon him with the
letters."

Betty sat down again on the window-seat and lifted a finger for
silence. Outside the door voices were speaking. Then the door was opened
and the old man-servant entered. He carried this time no card upon a
salver, but he was obviously impressed and a trifle flustered.

"Mademoiselle," he began, and Betty interrupted him. All trace of anxiety
had gone from her manner. She was once more mistress of herself.

"I know, Gaston. Show Monsieur Hanaud in at once."

But Monsieur Hanaud was already in. He bowed with a pleasant ceremony to
Betty Harlowe and shook hands cordially with Jim Frobisher.

"I was delighted as I came through the court, Mademoiselle, to see that
my friend here was already with you. For he will have told you that I am
not, after all, the ogre of the fairy-books."

"But you never looked up at the windows once," cried Betty in perplexity.

Hanaud smiled gaily. "Mademoiselle, it is in the technique of my trade
never to look up at windows and yet to know what is going on behind them.
With your permission?" And he laid his hat and cane upon a big writing-table in the middle of the room.

V: BETTY HARLOWE ANSWERS

"BUT we cannot see even through the widest of windows," Hanaud continued,
"what happened behind them a fortnight ago. In those cases, Mademoiselle,
we have to make ourselves the nuisance and ask the questions."

"I am ready to answer you," returned Betty quietly.

"Oh, of that--not a doubt," Hanaud cried genially. "Is it permitted to
me to seat myself? Yes?"

Betty jumped up, the pallor of her face flushed to pink.

"I beg your pardon. Of course, Monsieur Hanaud."

That little omission in her manners alone showed Jim Frobisher that she
was nervous. But for it, he would have credited her with a self-command
almost unnatural in her years.

"It is nothing," said Hanaud with a smile. "After all, we are--the
gentlest of us--disturbing guests." He took a chair from the side of the
table and drew it up close so that he faced Betty. But whatever advantage
was to be gained from the positions he yielded to her. For the light from
the window fell in all its morning strength upon his face, whilst hers
was turned to the interior of the room.

"So!" he said as he sat down. "Mademoiselle, I will first give you a plan
of our simple procedure, as at present I see it. The body of Madame
Harlowe was exhumed the night before last in the presence of your
notary."

Betty moved suddenly with a little shiver of revolt.

"I know," he continued quickly. "These necessities are distressing. But
we do Madame Harlowe no hurt, and we have to think of the living one,
you, Miss Betty Harlowe, and make sure that no suspicion shall rest upon
you--no, not even amongst your most loyal friends. Isn't that so? Well,
next, I put my questions to you here. Then we wait for the analyst's
report. Then the examining magistrate will no doubt make you his
compliments, and I, Hanaud, will, if I am lucky, carry back with me to
that dull Paris, a signed portrait of the beautiful Miss Harlowe against
my heart."

"And that will be all?" cried Betty, clasping her hands together in her
gratitude.

"For you, Mademoiselle, yes. But for our little Boris--no!" Hanaud
grinned with a mischievous anticipation. "I look forward to half an hour
with that broken-kneed one. I shall talk to him and I shall not be
dignified--no, not at all. I shall take care, too, that my good friend
Monsieur Frobisher is not present. He would take from me all my
enjoyment. He would look at me all prim like my maiden aunt and he would
say to himself, 'Shocking! Oh, that comic! What a fellow! He is not
proper.' No, and I shall not be proper. But, on the other hand, I will
laugh all the way from Dijon to Paris."

Monsieur Hanaud had indeed begun to laugh already and Betty suddenly
joined in with him. Hers was a clear, ringing laugh of enjoyment, and Jim
fancied himself once more in the hall hearing that laughter come pealing
through the open door.

"Ah, that is good!" exclaimed Hanaud. "You can laugh, Mademoiselle, even
at my foolishnesses. You must keep Monsieur Frobisher here in Dijon and
not let him return to London until he too has learnt that divinest of the
arts."

Hanaud hitched his chair a little nearer, and a most uncomfortable image
sprang at once into Jim Frobisher's mind. Just so, with light words and
little jokes squeezed out to tenuity, did doctors hitch up their chairs
to the bedsides of patients in a dangerous case. It took quite a few
minutes of Hanaud's questions before that image entirely vanished from
his thoughts.

"Good!" said Hanaud. "Now let us to business and get the facts all clear
and ordered!"

"Yes," Jim agreed, and he too hitched his chair a little closer. It was
curious, he reflected, how little he did know of the actual facts of the
case.

"Now tell me, Mademoiselle! Madame Harlowe died, so far as we know, quite
peacefully in her bed during the night."

"Yes," replied Betty.

"During the night of April the 27th?"

"Yes."

"She slept alone in her room that night?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"That was her rule?"

"Yes."

"I understand Madame Harlowe's heart had given her trouble for some
time."

"She had been an invalid for three years."

"And there was a trained nurse always in the house?"

"Yes."

Hanaud nodded. "Now tell me, Mademoiselle, where did this nurse sleep?
Next door to Madame?"

"No. A bedroom had been fitted up for her on the same floor but at the
end of the passage."

"And how far away was this bedroom?"

"There were two rooms separating it from my aunt's."

"Large rooms?"

"Yes," Betty explained. "These rooms are on the ground-floor, and are
what you would call reception-rooms. But, since Madame's heart made the
stairs dangerous for her, some of them were fitted up especially for her
use."

"Yes, I see," said Hanaud. "Two big reception-rooms between, eh? And
the walls of the house are thick. It is not difficult to see that it was
not built in these days. I ask you this, Mademoiselle. Would a cry from
Madame Harlowe at night, when all the house was silent, be heard in the
nurse's room?"

"I am very sure that it would not," Betty returned. "But there was a bell
by Madame's bed which rang in the nurse's room. She had hardly to lift
her arm to press the button."

"Ah!" said Hanaud. "A bell specially fitted up?"

"Yes."

"And the button within reach of the fingers. Yes. That is all very well,
if one does not faint, Mademoiselle. But suppose one does! Then the bell
is not very useful. Was there no room nearer which could have been set
aside for the nurse?"

"There was one next to my aunt's room, Monsieur Hanaud, with a
communicating door."

Hanaud was puzzled and sat back in his chair. Jim Frobisher thought the
time had come for him to interpose. He had been growing more and more
restless as the catechism progressed. He could not see any reason why
Betty, however readily and easily she answered, should be needlessly
pestered.

"Surely, Monsieur Hanaud," he said, "it would save a deal of time if we
paid a visit to these rooms and saw them for ourselves."

Hanaud swung round like a thing on a swivel. Admiration beamed in his
eyes. He gazed at his junior colleague in wonder.

"But what an idea!" he cried enthusiastically. "What a fine idea! How
ingenious! How difficult to conceive! And it is you, Monsieur Frobisher,
who have thought of it! I make you my distinguished compliments!" Then
all his enthusiasm declined into lassitude, and he sighed. "A pity--"

Hanaud waited intently for Jim to ask for an explanation of that sigh,
but Jim simply got red in the face and refused to oblige. He had
obviously made an asinine suggestion and was being rallied for it in
front of the beautiful Betty Harlowe, who looked to him for her
salvation; and on the whole he thought Hanaud to be a rather insufferable
person as he sat there brightly watching for some second inanity. Hanaud
in the end had to explain.

"We should have visited those rooms before now, Monsieur Frobisher. But
the Commissaire of Police has sealed them up and without his presence we
must not break the seals."

An almost imperceptible movement was made by Betty Harlowe in the window,
an almost imperceptible smile flickered for the space of a lightning-flash upon her lips; and Jim saw Hanaud stiffen like a watch-dog when
he hears a sound at night. "You are amused, Mademoiselle?" he asked
sharply.

"On the contrary, Monsieur." And the smile reappeared upon her face and
was seen to be what it was, pure wistfulness. "I had a hope those great
seals with their linen bands across the doors were all now to be removed.
It is fanciful, no doubt, but I have a horror of them. They seem to me
like an interdict upon the house."

Hanaud's manner changed in an instant. "That I can very well understand,
Mademoiselle," he said, "and I will make it my business to see that those
seals are broken. Indeed, there was no great use in affixing them, since
they were only affixed when the charge was brought and ten days after
Madame Harlowe died." He turned to Jim. "But we in France are all tied up
in red tape too. However, the question at which I am driving does not
depend upon any aspect of the rooms. It is this, Mademoiselle," and he
turned back to Betty.

"Madame Harlowe was an invalid with a nurse in constant attendance. How
is it that the nurse did not sleep in that suitable room with the
communicating-door? Why must she be where she could hear no cry, no
sudden call?"

Betty nodded her head. Here was a question which demanded an answer. She
leaned forward, choosing her words with care.

"Yes, but for that, Monsieur, you must understand something of Madame, my
aunt, and put yourself for a moment in her place. She would have it so.
She was, as you say, an invalid. For three years she had not gone beyond
the garden except in a private saloon once a year to Monte Carlo. But she
would not admit her malady. No, she was in her mind strong and a fighter.
She was going to get well, it was always a question of a few weeks with
her, and a nurse in her uniform always near with the door open, as though
she were in the last stages of illness--that distressed her." Betty
paused and went on again. "Of course, when she had some critical attack,
the nurse was moved. I myself gave the order. But as soon as the attack
subsided, the nurse must go. Madame would not endure it."

Jim understood that speech. Its very sincerity gave him a glimpse of the
dead woman, made him appreciate her tough vitality. She would not give
in. She did not want the paraphernalia of malady always about her. No,
she would sleep in her own room, and by herself, like other women of her
age. Yes, Jim understood that and believed every word that Betty spoke.
Only--only--she was keeping something back. It was that which troubled
him. What she said was true, but there was more to be said. There had
been hesitation in Betty's speech, too nice a choice of words and then
suddenly a little rush of phrases to cover up the hesitations. He looked
at Hanaud, who was sitting without a movement and with his eyes fixed
upon Betty's face, demanding more from her by his very Impassivity. They
were both, Jim felt sure, upon the edge of that little secret which,
according to Haslitt, as to Hanaud, was always at the back of such wild
charges as Waberski brought--the little shameful family secret which
must be buried deep from the world's eyes. And while Jim was pondering
upon this explanation of Betty's manner, he was suddenly startled out of
his wits by a passionate cry which broke from her lips.

"Why do you look at me like that?" she cried to Hanaud, her eyes suddenly
ablaze in her white face and her lips shaking. Her voice rose to a
challenge. "Do you disbelieve me, Monsieur Hanaud?"

Hanaud raised his hands in protest. He leaned back in his chair. The
vigilance of his eyes, of his whole attitude, was relaxed.

"I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle," he said with a good deal of self-reproach. "I do not disbelieve you. I was listening with both my ears to
what you said, so that I might never again have to trouble you with my
questions. But I should have remembered, what I forgot, that for a number
of days you have been living under a heavy strain. My manner was at
fault."

The small tornado of passion passed. Betty sank back in the corner of the
window-seat, her head resting against the side of the sash and her face
a little upturned.

"You are really very considerate, Monsieur Hanaud," she returned. "It is
I who should beg your pardon. For I was behaving like a hysterical
schoolgirl. Will you go on with your questions?"

"Yes," Hanaud replied gently. "It is better that we finish with them now.
Let us come back to the night of the 27th."

"Yes, Monsieur."

"Madame was in her usual health that night--neither better nor worse."

"If anything a little better," returned Betty.

"So that you did not hesitate to go on that evening to a dance given by
some friends of yours?"

Jim started. So Betty was actually out of the house on that fatal night.
Here was a new point in her favour. "A dance!" he cried, and Hanaud
lifted his hand.

"If you please, Monsieur Frobisher!" he said. "Let Mademoiselle speak!"

"I did not hesitate," Betty explained. "The life of the household had to
go on normally. It would never have done for me to do unusual things.
Madame was quick to notice. I think that although she would not admit
that she was dangerously ill, at the bottom of her mind she suspected
that she was; and one had to be careful not to alarm her."

"By such acts, for instance, as staying away from a dance to which she
knew that you had--meant to go?" said Hanaud. "Yes, Mademoiselle. I
quite understand that."

He cocked his head at Jim Frobisher, and added with a smile: "Ah, you did
not know that, Monsieur Frobisher. No, nor our friend Boris Waberski, I
think. Or he would hardly have rushed to the Prefect of Police in such a
hurry. Yes, Mademoiselle was dancing with her friends on this night when
she is supposed to be committing the most monstrous of crimes. By the
way, Mademoiselle, where was Boris Waberski on the night of the 27th?"

"He was away," returned Betty. "He went away on the 27th to fish for
trout at a village on the River Ouche, and he did not come back until the
morning of the 28th."

"Exactly," said Hanaud. "What a type, that fellow! Let us hope he had a
better landing-net for his trout than the one he prepared so hastily
for Mademoiselle Harlowe. Otherwise his three days' sport cannot have
amounted to much."

His laugh and his words called up a faint smile upon Betty's face and
then he swept back to his questions. "So you went to a dance,
Mademoiselle. Where?"

"At the house of Monsieur de Pouillac on the Boulevard Thiers."

"And at what hour did you go?"

"I left this house at five minutes to nine."

"You are sure of the hour?"

"Quite," said Betty.

"Did you see Madame Harlowe before you went?"

"Yes," Betty answered. "I went to her room just before I left. She took
her dinner in bed, as she often did. I was wearing for the dance a new
frock which I had bought this winter at Monte Carlo, and I went to her
room to show her how I looked in it."

"Was Madame alone?"

"No; the nurse was with her."

And upon that Hanaud smiled with a great appearance of cunning.

"I knew that, Mademoiselle," he declared with a friendly grin. "See, I
set a little trap for you. For I have here the evidence of the nurse
herself, Jeanne Baudin."

He took out from his pocket a sheet of paper upon which a paragraph was
typed. "Yes, the examining magistrate sent for her and took her
statement."

"I didn't know that," said Betty. "Jeanne left us the day of the funeral
and went home. I have not seen her since."

She nodded at Hanaud once or twice with a little smile of appreciation.

"I would not like to be a person with a secret to hide from you, Monsieur
Hanaud," she said admiringly. "I do not think that I should be able to
hide it for long."

Hanaud expanded under the flattery like a novice, and, to Jim Frobisher's
thinking, rather like a very vulgar novice. "You are wise, Mademoiselle,"
he exclaimed. "For, after all, I am Hanaud. There is only one," and he
thumped his chest and beamed delightedly. "Heavens, these are
politenesses! Let us get on. This is what the nurse declared," and he
read aloud from his sheet of paper: "Mademoiselle came to the bedroom, so
that Madame might admire her in her new frock of silver tissue and her
silver slippers. Mademoiselle arranged the pillows and saw that Madame
had her favourite books and her drink beside the bed. Then she wished her
good night, and with her pretty frock rustling and gleaming, she tripped
out of the room. As soon as the door was closed, Madame said to me--- -
" and Hanaud broke off abruptly. "But that does not matter," he said in a
hurry.

Suddenly and sharply Betty leaned forward. "Does it not. Monsieur?" she
asked, her eyes fixed upon his face, and the blood mounting slowly into
her pale cheeks.

"No," said Hanaud, and he began to fold the sheet of paper.

"What does the nurse report that Madame said to her about me, as soon as
the door was closed?" Betty asked, measuring out her words with a slow
insistence. "Come, Monsieur! I have a right to know," and she held out
her hand for the paper.

"You shall judge for yourself that it was of no importance," said Hanaud.
"Listen!" and once more he read: "Madame said to me, looking at her
clock, 'It is well that Mademoiselle has gone early. For Dijon is not
Paris, and unless you go in time there are no partners for you to dance
with.' It was then ten minutes to nine."

With a smile Hanaud gave the paper into Betty's hand; and she bent her
head over it swiftly, as though she doubted whether what he had recited
was really written on that sheet, as if she rather trembled to think what
Mrs. Harlowe had said of her after she had gone from the room. She took
only a second or two to glance over the page, but when she handed it back
to him, her manner was quite changed.

"Thank you," she said with a note of bitterness, and her deep eyes
gleamed with resentment. Jim understood the change and sympathized with
it. Hanaud had spoken of setting a trap when he had set none. For there
was no conceivable reason why she should hesitate to admit that she had
seen Mrs. Harlowe in the presence of the nurse, and wished her good night
before she went to the party. But he had set a real trap a minute
afterwards and into that Betty had straightway stumbled. He had tricked
her into admitting a dread that Mrs. Harlowe might have spoken of her in
disparagement or even in horror after she had left the bedroom.

"You must know, Monsieur Hanaud," she explained very coldly, "that women
are not always very generous to one another, and sometimes have not the
imagination--how shall I put it?--to visualize the possible
consequences of things they may say with merely the intention to hurt and
do a little harm. Jeanne Baudin and I were, so far as I ever knew, good
friends, but one is never sure, and when you folded up her statement in a
hurry I was naturally very anxious to hear the rest of it."

"Yes, I agree," Jim intervened. "It did look as if the nurse might have
added something malevolent which could neither be proved nor disproved."

"It was a misunderstanding, Mademoiselle," Hanaud replied in a voice of
apology. "We will take care that there shall not be any other." He looked
over the nurse's statement again.

"It is said here that you saw that Madame had her favourite books and her
drink beside the bed. That is true."

"Yes, Monsieur."

"What was that drink?"

"A glass of lemonade."

"It was placed on a table, I suppose, ready for her every night?"

"Every night."

"And there was no narcotic dissolved in it?"

"None," Betty replied. "If Mrs. Harlowe was restless, the nurse would
give an opium pill and very occasionally a slight injection of morphia."

"But that was not done on this night?"

"Not to my knowledge. If it was done, it was done after my departure."

"Very well," said Hanaud, and he folded the paper and put it away in his
pocket. "That is finished with. We have you now out of the house at five
minutes to nine in the evening, and Madame in her bed with her health no
worse than usual."

"Yes."

"Good!" Hanaud changed his attitude. "Now let us go over your evening,
Mademoiselle! I take it that you stayed at the house of M. de Pouillac
until you returned home."

"Yes."

"You remember with whom you danced? If it was necessary, could you give
me a list of your partners?"

She rose and, crossing to the writing-table, sat down in front of it.
She drew a sheet of paper towards her and took up a pencil. Pausing now
and again to jog her memory with the blunt end of the pencil at her lips,
she wrote down a list of names.

"These are all, I think," she said, handing the list to Hanaud. He put it
in his pocket.

"Thank you!" He was all contentment now. Although his questions followed
without hesitation, one upon the other, it seemed to Jim that he was
receiving just the answers which he expected. He had the air of a man
engaged upon an inevitable formality and anxious to get it completely
accomplished, rather than of one pressing keenly a strict investigation.

"Now, Mademoiselle, at what hour did you arrive home?"

"At twenty minutes past one."

"You are sure of that exact time? You looked at your watch? Or at the
clock in the hall? Or what? How are you sure that you reached the Maison
Crenelle exactly at twenty minutes past one?"

Hanaud hitched his chair a little more forward, but he had not to wait a
second for the answer.

"There is no clock in the hall and I had no watch with me," Betty
replied. "I don't like those wrist-watches which some girls wear. I
hate things round my wrists," and she shook her arm impatiently, as
though she imagined the constriction of a bracelet. "And I did not put my
watch in my hand-bag because I am so liable to leave that behind. So I
had nothing to tell me the time when I reached home. I was not sure that
I had not kept Georges--the chauffeur--out a little later than he cared
for. So I made him my excuse, explaining that I didn't really know how
late I was."

"I see. It was Georges who told you the time at the actual moment of your
arrival?"

"Yes."

"And Georges is no doubt the chauffeur whom I saw at work as I crossed
the courtyard?"

"Yes. He told me that he was glad to see me have a little gaiety, and he
took out his watch and showed it to me with a laugh."

"This happened at the front door, or at those big iron gates,
Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked.

"At the front door. There is no lodge-keeper and the gates are left
open when anyone is out."

"And how did you get into the house?"

"I used my latchkey."

"Good! All this is very clear."

Betty, however, was not mollified by Hanaud's satisfaction with her
replies. Although she answered him without delay, her answers were given
mutinously. Jim began to be a little troubled. She should have met Hanaud
half-way; she was imprudently petulant.

"She'll make an enemy of this man before she has done," he reflected
uneasily. But he glanced at the detective and was relieved. For Hanaud
was watching her with a smile which would have disarmed any less offended
young lady--a smile half friendliness and half amusement. Jim took a
turn upon himself.

"After all," he argued, "this very imprudence pleads for her better than
any calculation. The guilty don't behave like that." And he waited for
the next stage in the examination with an easy mind.

"Now we have got you back home and within the Maison Grenelle before half-past one in the morning," resumed Hanaud. "What did you do then?"

"I went straight upstairs to my bedroom," said Betty.

"Was your maid waiting up for you, Mademoiselle?"

"No; I had told her that I should be late and that I could undress
myself."

"You are considerate, Mademoiselle. No wonder that your servants were
pleased that you should have a little gaiety."

Even that advance did not appease the offended girl.

"Yes?" she asked with a sort of silky sweetness which was more hostile
than any acid rejoinder. But it did not stir Hanaud to any resentment.

"When, then, did you first hear of Madame Harlowe's death?" he asked.

"The next morning my maid Francine came running into my room at seven
o'clock. The nurse, Jeanne, had just discovered it. I slipped on my
dressing-gown and ran downstairs. As soon as I saw that it was true, I
rang up the two doctors who were in the habit of attending here."

"Did you notice the glass of lemonade?"

"Yes. It was empty."

"Your maid is still with you?"

"Yes--Francine Rollard. She is at your disposal."

Hanaud shrugged his shoulders and smiled doubtfully.

"That, if it is necessary at all, can come later. We have the story of
your movements now from you, Mademoiselle, and that is what is
important."

He rose from his chair. "I have been, I am afraid, a very troublesome
person, Mademoiselle Harlowe," he said with a bow. "But it is very
necessary for your own sake that no obscurities should be left for the
world's suspicions to play with. And we are very close to the end of this
ordeal."

Jim had nursed a hope the moment Hanaud rose that this wearing interview
had already ended. Betty, for her part, was indifferent.

"That is for you to say, Monsieur," she said implacably.

"Just two points then, and I think, upon reflection, you will understand
that I have asked you no question which is unfair."

Betty bowed. "Your two points, Monsieur."

"First, then. You inherit, I believe, the whole fortune of Madame?"

"Yes."

"Did you expect to inherit it all? Did you know of her will?"

"No. I expected that a good deal of the money would be left to Monsieur
Boris. But I don't remember that she ever told me so. I expected it,
because Monsieur Boris so continually repeated that it was so."

"No doubt," said Hanaud lightly. "As to yourself, was Madame generous to
you during her life?"

The hard look disappeared from Betty's face. It softened to sorrow and
regret.

"Very," she answered in a low voice. "I had one thousand pounds a year as
a regular allowance, and a thousand pounds goes a long way in Dijon.
Besides, if I wanted more, I had only to ask for it."

Betty's voice broke in a sob suddenly and Hanaud turned away with a
delicacy for which Jim was not prepared. He began to look at the books
upon the shelves, that she might have time to control her sorrow, taking
down one here, one there, and speaking of them in a casual tone.

"It is easy to see that this was the library of Monsieur Simon Harlowe,"
he said, and was suddenly brought to a stop. For the door was thrown open
and a girl broke into the room.

"Betty," she began, and stood staring from one to another of Betty's
visitors.

"Ann, this is Monsieur Hanaud," said Betty with a careless wave of her
hand, and Ann went white as a sheet.

Ann! Then this girl was Ann Upcott, thought Jim Frobisher, the girl who
had written to him, the girl, all acquaintanceship with whom he had twice
denied, and he had sat side by side with her, he had even spoken to her.
She swept across the room to him.

"So you have come!" she cried. "But I knew that you would!"

Jim was conscious of a mist of shining yellow hair, a pair of sapphire
eyes, and of a face impertinently lovely and most delicate in its colour.

"Of course I have come," he said feebly, and Hanaud looked on with a
smile. He had an eye on Betty Harlowe, and the smile said as clearly as
words could say, "That young man is going to have a deal of trouble
before he gets out of Dijon."

VI: JIM CHANGES HIS LODGING

THE library was a big oblong room with two tall windows looking into the
court, and the observation-window thrown out at the end over the footway
of the street. A door in the inner wall close to this window led to a
room behind, and a big open fireplace faced the windows on the court. For
the rest, the walls were lined with high bookshelves filled with books,
except for a vacant space here and there where a volume had been removed.
Hanaud put back in its place the book which he had been holding in his
hand.

"One can easily see that this is the library of Simon Harlowe, the
collector," he said. "I have always thought that if one only had the time
to study and compare the books which a man buys and reads, one would more
surely get the truth of him than in any other way. But alas! one never
has the time." He turned towards Jim Frobisher regretfully, "Come and
stand with me, Monsieur Frobisher. For even a glance at the backs of them
tells one something."

Jim took his place by Hanaud's side. "Look, here is a book on Old English
Gold Plate, and another--pronounce that title for me, if you please."

Jim read the title of the book on which Hanaud's finger was placed.
"Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain."

Hanaud repeated the inscription and moved along. From a shelf at the
level of his breast and just to the left of the window in which Betty was
sitting, he took a large, thinnish volume, in a paper cover, and turned
over the plates. It was a brochure upon Battersea Enamel.

"There should be a second volume," said Jim Frobisher with a glance at
the bookshelf. It was the idlest of remarks. He was not paying any
attention to the paper-covered book upon Battersea Enamel. For he was
really engaged in speculating why Hanaud had called him to his side. Was
it on the chance that he might detect some swift look of understanding as
it was exchanged by the two girls, some sign that they were in a
collusion? If so, he was to be disappointed. For though Betty and Ann
were now free from Hanaud's vigilant eye, neither of them moved, neither
of them signalled to the other. Hanaud, however, seemed entirely
interested in his book. He answered Jim's suggestion.

"Yes, one would suppose that there were a second volume. But this is
complete," he said, and he put back the book in its place. There was room
next to it for another quarto book, so long as it was no thicker, and
Hanaud rested his finger in the vacant place on the shelf, with his
thoughts clearly far away.

Betty recalled him to his surroundings.

"Monsieur Hanaud," she said in her quiet voice from her seat in the
window, "there was a second point, you said, on which you would like to
ask me a question."

"Yes, Mademoiselle, I had not forgotten it." He turned with a curiously
swift movement and stood so that he had both girls in front of him, Betty
on his left in the window, Ann Upcott standing a little apart upon his
right, gazing at him with a look of awe.

"Have you, Mademoiselle," he asked, "been pestered, since Boris Waberski
brought his accusation, with any of these anonymous letters which seem to
be flying about Dijon?"

"I have received one," answered Betty, and Ann Upcott raised her eyebrows
in surprise. "It came on Sunday morning. It was very slanderous, of
course, and I should have taken no notice of it but for one thing. It
told me that you, Monsieur Hanaud, were coming from Paris to take up the
case."

"Oho!" said Hanaud softly. "And you received this letter on the Sunday
morning? Can you show it to me, Mademoiselle?"

Betty shook her head. "No, Monsieur."

Hanaud smiled. "Of course not. You destroyed it, as such letter should be
destroyed."

"No, I didn't," Betty answered. "I kept it. I put it away in a drawer of
my writing-table in my own sitting-room. But that room is sealed up,
Monsieur Hanaud. The letter is in the drawer still."

Hanaud received the statement with a frank satisfaction.

"It cannot run away, then, Mademoiselle," he said contentedly. But the
contentment passed. "So the Commissaire of Police actually sealed up your
private sitting-room. That, to be sure, was going a little far."

Betty shrugged her shoulders. "It was mine, you see, where I keep my
private things. And after all I was accused!" she said bitterly; but Ann
Upcott was not satisfied to leave the matter there. She drew a step
nearer to Betty and then looked at Hanaud.

"But that is not all the truth," she said. "Betty's room belongs to that
suite of rooms in which Madame Harlowe's bedroom was arranged. It is the
last room of the suite opening on to the hall, and for that reason, as
the Commissaire said with an apology, it was necessary to seal it up with
the others."

"I thank you, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud with a smile. "Yes, that of
course softens his action." He looked whimsically at Betty in the window-seat. "It has been my misfortune, I am afraid, to offend Mademoiselle
Harlowe. Will you help me to get all these troublesome dates now clear?
Madame Harlowe was buried, I understand, on the Saturday morning twelve
days ago!"

"Yes, Monsieur," said Ann Upcott.

"And after the funeral, on your return to this house, the notary opened
and read the will?"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"And in Boris Waberski's presence?"

"Yes."

"Then exactly a week later, on Saturday, the 7th of May, he goes off
quickly to the Prefecture of Police?"

"Yes."

"And on Sunday morning by the post comes the anonymous letter?"

Hanaud turned away to Betty, who bowed her head in answer.

"And a little later on the same morning comes the Commissaire, who seals
the doors?"

"At eleven o'clock, to be exact," replied Ann Upcott.

Hanaud bowed low. "You are both wonderful young ladies. You notice the
precise hour at which things happen. It is a rare gift, and very useful
to people like myself."

Ann Upcott had been growing easier and easier in her manner with each
answer that she gave. Now she could laugh outright. "I do, at all events,
Monsieur Hanaud," she said. "But alas! I was born to be an old maid. A
chair out of place, a book disarranged, a clock not keeping time, or even
a pin on the carpet--I cannot bear these things. I notice them at once
and I must put them straight. Yes, it was precisely eleven o'clock when
the Commissaire of Police rang the bell."

"Did he search the rooms before he sealed them?" Hanaud asked.

"No. We both of us thought his negligence strange," Ann replied, "until
he informed us that the examining magistrate wanted everything left just
as it was."

Hanaud laughed genially. "That was on my account," he explained. "Who
could tell what wonderful things Hanaud might not discover with his
magnifying-glass when he arrived from Paris? What fatal finger-
prints! Oh! Ho! ho! What scraps of burnt letter! Ah! Ha! ha! But I tell
you, Mademoiselle, that if a crime has been committed in this house, even
Hanaud would not expect to make any startling discoveries in rooms which
had been open to the whole household for a fortnight since the crime.
However," and he moved towards the door, "since I am here now –"

Betty was upon her feet like a flash of lightning. Hanaud stopped and
swung round upon her, swiftly, with his eyes very challenging and hard.

"You are going to break those seals now?" she asked with a curious
breathlessness. "Then may I come with you--please, please! It is I who
am accused. I have a right to be present," and her voice rose into an
earnest cry.

"Calm yourself, Mademoiselle," Hanaud returned gently. "No advantage will
be taken of you. I am going to break no seals. That, as I have told you,
is the right of the Commissaire, who is a magistrate, and he will not
move until the medical analysis is ready. No, what I was going to propose
was that Mademoiselle here," and he pointed to Ann, "should show me the
outside of those reception-rooms and the rest of the house."

"Of course," said Betty, and she sat down again in the window-seat.

"Thank you," said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann Upcott. "Shall we go? And
as we go, will you tell me what you think of Boris Waberski?"

"He has some nerve. I can tell you that, Monsieur Hanaud," Ann cried. "He
actually came back to this house after he had lodged his charge, and
asked me to support him"; and she passed out of the room in front of
Hanaud.

Jim Frobisher followed the couple to the door and closed it behind them.
The last few minutes had set his mind altogether at rest. The author of
the anonymous letters was the detective's real quarry. His manner had
quite changed when putting his questions about them. The flamboyancies
and the indifference, even his amusement at Betty's ill-humour, had
quite disappeared. He had got to business watchfully, quietly. Jim came
back into the room. He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and
opened it.

"May I smoke?" he asked. As he turned to Betty for permission, a fresh
shock brought his thoughts and words alike to a standstill. She was
staring at him with panic naked in her eyes and her face set like a
tragic mask.

"He believes me guilty," she whispered.

"No," said Jim, and he went to her side. But she would not listen.

"He does. I am sure of it. Don't you see that he was bound to? He was
sent from Paris. He has his reputation to think of. He must have his
victim before he returns."

Jim was sorely tempted to break his word. He had only to tell the real
cause which had fetched Hanaud out of Paris and Betty's distress was
gone. But he could not. Every tradition of his life strove to keep him
silent. He dared not even tell her that this charge against her was only
an excuse. She must live in anxiety for a little while longer. He laid
his hand gently upon her shoulder.

"Betty, don't believe that!" he said, with a consciousness of how weak
that phrase was compared with the statement he could have made. "I was
watching Hanaud, listening to him. I am sure that he already knew the
answers to the questions he was asking you. Why, he even knew that Simon
Harlowe had a passion for collecting, though not a word had been said of
it. He was asking questions to see how you would answer them, setting now
and then a little trap, as he admitted--"

"Yes," said Betty in trembling voice, "all the time he was setting
traps."

"And every answer that you gave, even your manner in giving them," Jim
continued stoutly, "more and more made clear your innocence."

"To him?" asked Betty.

"Yes, to him. I am sure of it."

Betty Harlowe caught at his arm and held it in both her hands. She leaned
her head against it. Through the sleeve of his coat he felt the velvet of
her cheek.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you, Jim," and as she pronounced the
name she smiled. She was thanking him not so much for the stout
confidence of his words, as for the comfort which the touch of him gave
to her.

"Very likely I am making too much of little things," she went on. "Very
likely I am ungenerous, too, to Monsieur Hanaud. But he lives amidst
crimes and criminals. He must be so used to seeing people condemned and
passing out of sight into blackness and horrors, that one more or less,
whether innocent or guilty, going that way, wouldn't seem to matter very
much."

"Yes, Betty, I think that is a little unjust," Jim Frobisher remarked
gently.

"Very well, I take it back," she said, and she let his arm go. "All the
same, Jim, I am looking to you, not to him," and she laughed with an
appealing tremor in the laugh which took his heart by storm.

"Luckily," said he, "you don't have to look to anyone," and he had hardly
finished the sentence before Ann Upcott came back alone into the room.
She was about Betty's height and Betty's age and had the same sort of
boyish slenderness and carriage which marks the girls of this generation.
But in other respects, even to the colour of her clothes, she was as
dissimilar as one girl can be from another. She was dressed in white from
her coat to her shoes, and she wore a big gold hat so that one was almost
at a loss to know where her hat ended and her hair began.

"And Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"He is prowling about by himself," she replied. "I showed him all the
rooms and who used them, and he said that he would have a look at them
and sent me back to you,"

"Did he break the seals on the reception-rooms?" Betty Harlowe asked.

"Oh, no," said Ann. "Why, he told us that he couldn't do that without the
Commissaire."

"Yes, he told us that," Betty remarked dryly.

"But I was wondering whether he meant what he told us."

"Oh, I don't think Monsieur Hanaud's alarming," said Ann. She gave Jim
Frobisher the impression that at any moment she might call him a dear old
thing. She had quite got over the first little shock which the
announcement of his presence had caused her. "Besides," and she sat down
by the side of Betty in the window-seat and looked with the frankest
confidence at Jim--"besides, we can feel safe now, anyway."

Jim Frobisher threw up his hands in despair. That queer look of aloofness
had played him false with Ann Upcott now, as it had already done with
Betty. If these two girls had called on him for help when a sudden squall
found them in an open sailing-boat with the sheet of the sail made
fast, or on the ice-slope of a mountain, or with a rhinoceros lumbering
towards them out of some forest of the Nile, he would not have shrunk
from their trust. But this was quite a different matter. They were calmly
pitting him against Hanaud.

"You were safe before," he exclaimed. "Hanaud is not your enemy, and as
for me, I have neither experience nor natural gifts for this sort of
work"--and he broke off with a groan. For both the girls were watching
him with a smile of complete disbelief.

"Good heavens, they think that I am being astute!" he reflected; "and the
more I confess my incapacity the astuter they'll take me to be." He gave
up all arguments. "Of course I am absolutely at your service," he said.

"Thank you," said Betty. "You will bring your luggage from your hotel and
stay here, won't you?"

Jim was tempted to accept that invitation. But, on the one hand, he might
wish to see Hanaud at the Grande Taverne; or Hanaud might wish to see
him, and secrecy was to be the condition of such meetings. It was better
that he should keep his freedom of movement complete.

"I won't put you to so much trouble, Betty," he replied. "There's no
reason in the world that I should. A call over the telephone and in five
minutes I am at your side."

Betty Harlowe seemed in doubt to press her invitation or not.

"It looks a little inhospitable in me…" she began, and the door opened,
and Hanaud entered the room.

"I left my hat and stick here," he said. He picked them up and bowed to
the girls.

"You have seen everything, Monsieur Hanaud?" Betty asked.

"Everything, Mademoiselle. I shall not trouble you again until the report
of the analysis is in my hands. I wish you a good morning."

Betty slipped off the window-seat and accompanied him out into the
hall. It appeared to Jim Frobisher that she was seeking to make some
amends for her ill-humour; and when he heard her voice he thought to
detect in it some note of apology.

"I shall be very glad if you will let me know the sense of that report as
soon as possible," she pleaded. "You, better than anyone, will understand
that this is a difficult hour for me."

"I understand very well, Mademoiselle," Hanaud answered gravely. "I will
see to it that the hour is not prolonged."

Jim, watching them through the doorway, as they stood together in the
sunlit hall, felt ever so slight a touch upon his arm. He wheeled about
quickly. Ann Upcott was at his side with all the liveliness and even the
delicate colour gone from her face, and a wild and desperate appeal in
her eyes.

"You will come and stay here? Oh, please!" she whispered.

"I have just refused," he answered. "You heard me."

"I know," she went on, the words stumbling over one another from her
lips. "But take back your refusal. Do! Oh, I am frightened out of my
wits. I don't understand anything. I am terrified!" And she clasped her
hands together in supplication. Jim had never seen fear so stark, no, not
even in Betty's eyes a few minutes ago. It robbed her exquisite face of
all its beauty, and made it in a second haggard and old. But before he
could answer, a stick clattered loudly upon the pavement of the hall and
startled them both like the crack of a pistol.

Jim looked through the doorway. Hanaud was stooping to pick up his cane.
Betty made a dive for it, but Hanaud already had it in his hands.

"I thank you, Mademoiselle, but I can still touch my toes. Every morning
I do it five times in my pyjamas," and with a laugh he ran down the
couple of steps into the courtyard and with that curiously quick saunter
of his was out into the street of Charles-Robert in a moment. When Jim
turned again to Ann Upcott, the fear had gone from her face so completely
that he could hardly believe his eyes.

"Betty, he is going to stay," she cried gaily.

"So I inferred," replied Betty with a curious smile as she came back into
the room.

VII: EXIT WABERSKI

JIM FROBISHER neither saw nor heard any more of Hanaud that day. He
fetched his luggage away from the hotel and spent the evening with Betty
Harlowe and Ann Upcott at the Maison Grenelle. They took their coffee
after dinner in the garden behind the house, descending to it by a short
flight of stone steps from a great door at the back of the hall. And by
some sort of unspoken compact they avoided all mention of Waberski's
charge. They had nothing to do but to wait now for the analyst's report.
But the long line of high, shuttered windows just above their heads, the
windows of the reception-rooms, forbade them to forget the subject, and
their conversation perpetually dwindled down into long silences. It was
cool out here in the dark garden, cool and very still; so that the bustle
of a bird amongst the leaves of the sycamores startled them, and the rare
footsteps of a passer-by in the little street of Charles-Robert rang
out as though they would wake a dreaming city. Jim noticed that once or
twice Ann Upcott leaned swiftly forward and stared across the dark lawns
and glimmering paths to the great screen of tall trees, as if her eyes
had detected a movement amongst their stems. But on each occasion she
said nothing and with an almost inaudible sigh sank back in her chair.

"Is there a door into the garden from the street?" Frobisher asked, and
Betty answered him.

"No. There is a passage at the end of the house under the reception-rooms from the courtyard which the gardeners use. The only other entrance
is through the hall behind us. This old house was built in days when your
house really was your castle, and the fewer the entrances, the more
safely you slept."

The clocks of that city of clocks clashed out the hour of eleven,
throwing the sounds of their strokes backwards and forwards above the
pinnacles and roof-tops in a sort of rivalry. Betty rose to her feet.

"There's a day gone, at all events," she said, and Ann Upcott agreed with
a breath of relief. To Jim it seemed a pitiful thing that these two
girls, to whom each day should be a succession of sparkling hours all too
short, must be rejoicing quietly, almost gratefully, that another of them
had passed.

"It should be the last of the bad days," he said, and Betty turned
swiftly towards him, her great eyes shining in the darkness.

"Good night, Jim," she said, her voice ever so slightly lingering like a
caress upon his name; and she held out her hand. "It's terribly dull for
you, but we are not unselfish enough to let you go. You see, we are
shunned just now--oh, it's natural! To have you with us means a great
deal. For one thing," and there came a little lilt in her voice, "I shall
sleep tonight." She ran up the steps and stood for a moment against the
light from the hall. "A long-legged slip of a girl, in black silk
stockings"--thus Mr. Haslitt had spoken of her as she was five years
ago, and the description fitted her still.

"Good night, Betty," said Jim, and Ann Upcott ran past him up the steps
and waved her hand.

"Good night," said Jim, and with a little twist of her shoulders Ann
followed Betty. She came back, however. She was wearing a little white
frock of crepe de Chine with white stockings and satin shoes, and she
gleamed at the head of the steps like a slender thing of silver.

"You'll bolt the door when you come in, won't you?" she pleaded with a
curious anxiety considering the height of the strong walls about the
garden.

"I will," said Jim, and he wondered why in all this business Ann Upcott
stood out as a note of fear. It was high time indeed that the long line
of windows was thrown open and the interdict raised from the house and
its inmates. Jim Frobisher paced the quiet garden in the darkness with a
prayer at his heart that that time would come tomorrow. In Betty's room
above the reception-rooms the light was still burning behind the
latticed shutters of the windows, in spite of her confidence that she
would sleep--yes, and in Ann Upcott's room too, at the end of the house
towards the street. A fury against Boris Waberski flamed up in him.

It was late before he himself went into the house and barred the door,
later still before he fell asleep. But once asleep, he slept soundly, and
when he waked, it was to find his shutters thrown wide to the sunlight,
his coffee cold by his bedside, and Gaston, the old servant, in the room.

"Monsieur Hanaud asked me to tell you he was in the library," he said.

Jim was out of bed in an instant. "Already? What is the time, Gaston?"

"Nine o'clock. I have prepared Monsieur's bath." He removed the tray from
the table by the bed. "I will bring some fresh coffee."

"Thank you! And will you please tell Monsieur Hanaud that I will not be
long."

"Certainly, Monsieur."

Jim took his coffee while he dressed and hurried down to the library,
where he found Hanaud seated at the big writing-table in the middle of
the room, with a newspaper spread out over the blotting-pad and
placidly reading the news. He spoke quickly enough, however, the moment
Jim appeared.

"So you left your hotel in the Place Darcy, after all, eh, my friend? The
exquisite Miss Upcott! She had but to sigh out a little prayer and clasp
her hands together, and it was done. Yes, I saw it all from the hall.
What it is to be young! You have those two letters which Waberski wrote
your firm?"

"Yes," said Jim. He did not think it necessary to explain that though the
prayer was Ann Upcott's, it was the thought of Betty which had brought
him to the Maison Grenelle.

"Good! I have sent for him," said Hanaud.

"To come to this house?"

"I am expecting him now."

"That's capital," cried Jim. "I shall meet him, then! The damned rogue! I
shouldn't wonder if I thumped him," and he clenched his fist and shook it
in a joyous anticipation.

"I doubt if that would be so helpful as you think. No, I beg of you to
place yourself in my hands this morning, Monsieur Frobisher," Hanaud
interposed soberly. "If you confront Waberski at once with those two
letters, at once his accusation breaks down. He will withdraw it. He will
excuse himself. He will burst into a torrent of complaints and
reproaches. And I shall get nothing out of him. That I do not want."

"But what is there to be got?" Jim asked impatiently.

"Something perhaps. Perhaps nothing," the detective returned with a shrug
of the shoulders. "I have a second mission in Dijon, as I told you in
Paris."

"The anonymous letters?"

"Yes. You were present yesterday when Mademoiselle Harlowe told me how
she learned that I was summoned from Paris upon this case. It was not,
after all, any of my colleagues here who spread the news. It is even now
unknown that I am here. No, it was the writer of the letters. And in so
difficult a matter I can afford to neglect no clue. Did Waberski know
that I was going to be sent for? Did he hear that at the Prefecture when
he lodged his charge on the Saturday or from the examining magistrate on
the same day? And if he did, to whom did he talk between the time when he
saw the magistrate and the time when letters must be posted, if they are
to be delivered on the Sunday morning? These are questions I must have
the answer to, and if we at once administer the knock-out with your
letters, I shall not get them. I must lead him on with friendliness. You
see that."

Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with
Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and
trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the
gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all
for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the
authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty
Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.

"But I am to meet this man," he said. "That must not be forgotten."

"And it shall not be," Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in
the inner wall close to the observation-window and opened it.

"See! If you will please to wait in here," and as the disappointment
deepened on Jim's face, he added, "Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door.
No. Bring up a chair to it--- so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you
will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You
would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all
do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part," and with a
friendly grin he turned back to the table.

A shuffling step which merged into the next step with a curiously
slovenly sound rose from the courtyard.

"It was time we made our little arrangements," said Hanaud in an
undertone. "For here comes our hero from the Steppes."

Jim popped his head through the doorway.

"Monsieur Hanaud!" he whispered excitedly. "Monsieur Hanaud! It cannot be
wise to leave those windows open on the courtyard. For if we can hear a
footstep so loudly in this room, anything said in this room will be
easily overheard in the court."

"But how true that is!" Hanaud replied in the same voice and struck his
forehead with his fist in anger at his folly. "But what are we to do? The
day is so hot. This room will be an oven. The ladies and Waberski will
all faint. Besides, I have an officer in plain clothes already stationed
in the court to see that it is kept empty. Yes, we will risk it."

Jim drew back.

"That man doesn't welcome advice from anyone," he said indignantly, but
he said it only to himself; and almost before he had finished, the bell
rang. A few seconds afterwards Gaston entered.

"Monsieur Boris," he said.

"Yes," said Hanaud with a nod. "And will you tell the ladies that we are
ready?"

Boris Waberski, a long, round-shouldered man with bent knees and clumsy
feet, dressed in black and holding a soft black felt hat in his hand,
shambled quickly into the room and stopped dead at the sight of Hanaud.
Hanaud bowed and Waberski returned the bow; and then the two men stood
looking at one another--Hanaud all geniality and smiles, Waberski a
rather grotesque figure of uneasiness like one of those many grim
caricatures carved by the imagination of the Middle Ages on the columns
of the churches of Dijon. He blinked in perplexity at the detective and
with his long, tobacco-stained fingers tortured his grey moustache.

"Will you be seated?" said Hanaud politely. "I think that the ladies will
not keep us waiting."

He pointed towards a chair in front of the writing-table but on his
left hand and opposite to the door.

"I don't understand," said Waberski doubtfully. "I received a message. I
understood that the examining magistrate had sent for me."

"I am his agent," said Hanaud. "I am--" and he stopped. "Yes?"

Boris Waberski stared. "I said nothing."

"I beg your pardon. I am--Hanaud." He shot the name out quickly, but he
was answered by no start, nor by any sign of recognition.

"Hanaud?" Waberski shook his head. "That no doubt should be sufficient to
enlighten me," he said with a smile, "but it is better