Celia shuddered from head to foot, and, burying her face in the cushion, lay trembling.  She would have begged for death upon her knees rather than suffer this horror.  She felt Vauquier’s fingers lingering with a dreadful caressing touch upon her shoulders and about her throat.  She was within an ace of the torture, the disfigurement, and she knew it.  She could not pray for mercy.  She could only lie quite still, as she was bidden, trying to control the shuddering of her limbs and body.

“It would be a good lesson for Mlle. Celie,” Helene continued slowly.  “I think that if Mlle. Celie will forgive the liberty I ought to inflict it.  One little tilt of the flask and the satin of these pretty shoulders—­”

She broke off suddenly and listened.  Some sound heard outside had given Celia a respite, perhaps more than a respite.  Helene set the flask down upon the table.  Her avarice had got the better of her hatred.  She roughly plucked the earrings out of the girl’s ears.  She hid them quickly in the bosom of her dress with her eye upon the door.  She did not see a drop of blood gather on the lobe of Celia’s ear and fall into the cushion on which her face was pressed.  She had hardly hidden them away before the door opened and Adele Rossignol burst into the room.

“What is the matter?” asked Vauquier.

“The safe’s empty.  We have searched the room.  We have found nothing,” she cried.

“Everything is in the safe,” Helene insisted.

“No.”

The two women ran out of the room and up the stairs.  Celia, lying on the settee, heard all the quiet of the house change to noise and confusion.  It was as though a tornado raged in the room overhead.  Furniture was tossed about and over the room, feet stamped and ran, locks were smashed in with heavy blows.  For many minutes the storm raged.  Then it ceased, and she heard the accomplices clattering down the stairs without a thought of the noise they made.  They burst into the room.  Harry Wethermill was laughing hysterically, like a man off his head.  He had been wearing a long dark overcoat when he entered the house; now he carried the coat over his arm.  He was in a dinner-jacket, and his black clothes were dusty and disordered.

“It’s all for nothing!” he screamed rather than cried.  “Nothing but the one necklace and a handful of rings!”

In a frenzy he actually stooped over the dead woman and questioned her.

“Tell us—­where did you hide them?” he cried.

“The girl will know,” said Helene.

Wethermill rose up and looked wildly at Celia.

“Yes, yes,” he said.