“Certainly,” said the Commissaire.

“Yes,” said Mr. Ricardo.

“To be sure, monsieur,” said Perrichet.

As for Harry Wethermill, he made no reply.  His burning eyes were fixed upon Hanaud’s face, and that was all.  Hanaud, for his part, asked for no reply from him.  Indeed, he did not look towards Harry Wethermill’s face at all.  Ricardo understood.  Hanaud did not mean to be deterred by the suffering written there.

He went down again into the little gay salon lit with flowers and August sunlight, and stood beside the couch gazing at it with troubled eyes.  And, as he gazed, he closed his eyes and shivered.  He shivered like a man who has taken a sudden chill.  Nothing in all this morning’s investigations, not even the rigid body beneath the sheet, nor the strange discovery of the jewels, had so impressed Ricardo.  For there he had been confronted with facts, definite and complete; here was a suggestion of unknown horrors, a hint, not a fact, compelling the imagination to dark conjecture.  Hanaud shivered.  That he had no idea why Hanaud shivered made the action still more significant, still more alarming.  And it was not Ricardo alone who was moved by it.  A voice of despair rang through the room.  The voice was Harry Wethermill’s, and his face was ashy white.

“Monsieur!” he cried, “I do not know what makes you shudder; but I am remembering a few words you used this morning.”

Hanaud turned upon his heel.  His face was drawn and grey and his eyes blazed.

“My friend, I also am remembering those words,” he said.  Thus the two men stood confronting one another, eye to eye, with awe and fear in both their faces.

Ricardo was wondering to what words they both referred, when the sound of wheels broke in upon the silence.  The effect upon Hanaud was magical.  He thrust his hands in his pockets.

“Helene Vauquier’s cab,” he said lightly.  He drew out his cigarette-case and lighted a cigarette.

“Let us see that poor woman safely off.  It is a closed cab I hope.”

It was a closed landau.  It drove past the open door of the salon to the front door of the house.  In Hanaud’s wake they all went out into the hall.  The nurse came down alone carrying Helene Vauquier’s bag.  She placed it in the cab and waited in the doorway.

“Perhaps Helene Vauquier has fainted,” she said anxiously:  “she does not come.”  And she moved towards the stairs.

Hanaud took a singularly swift step forward and stopped her.

“Why should you think that?” he asked, with a queer smile upon his face, and as he spoke a door closed gently upstairs.  “See,” he continued, “you are wrong:  she is coming.”

Ricardo was puzzled.  It had seemed to him that the door which had closed so gently was nearer than Helene Vauquier’s door.  It seemed to him that the door was upon the first, not the second landing.  But Hanaud had noticed nothing strange; so it could not be.  He greeted Helene Vauquier with a smile as she came down the stairs.