few minutes before, seemed suddenly to have changed into the likeness of a half-brutal animal. His attitude was almost ferocious. There was something wolflike in the uplifting of his lips, a gleam of something malign and threatening in those steely eyes. One had the idea that he remained speechless through sheer incapacity. The whole episode was immeasurably brief, but it evolved its own peculiar sensation. Andrew himself broke the spell.
“Tabloid drama by famous criminal lawyer,” he exclaimed. “Is this the French method of extorting a confession, Dick? I nearly fell on my knees.”
The moment had passed. Charles was dabbing his lips with an over-perfumed, cambric handkerchief. The cynosure still of that little circle of eyes, he understood that some explanation was necessary.
“I follow your language, perhaps, yet with some difficulty,” he explained, in a distinctly unnatural voice. “I did not quite understand.”
“Sir Richard has no enunciation,” Andrew declared. “Bites at his words all the time. What can you expect of a race of professional men who pronounce the simple words ‘My Lord’—‘M’lud’—”
Sir Richard smiled gravely, but with a curious little gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.
“I was perhaps to blame,” he acknowledged, “for introducing what is after all a serious matter into a chaffing discussion.”
The butler reappeared for the second time with a replenished cocktail shaker. Every one began to talk at once, but long before the fresh supply was consumed the little company had drifted away, and Glenlitten and Félice were left alone in the deserted room, Félice sank exhausted into an easy-chair, and for the first time a strange new feeling, almost of fear, crept into her heart as she watched her husband select a cigarette from the box and light it.
“Sensitive, passionate lot, some of your people,” he observed, in his usual good-humoured tone. “I thought your dancing master was going to spring at us all a few minutes ago.”
Félice attempted an indifferent reply, although the grizzly fingers of fear were drawing at her heart strings.
“I think he did not quite understand,” she said. “You see all our—is it not chaff, you call it?—is so personal. I, too, found it difficult at first to know when any one was in earnest. Now,” she concluded, “I think I understand.”
The dressing bell sounded and they moved towards the door, his arm around her waist.
“I don’t believe I’m very clever,” he admitted, “at sizing up people of different nationalities, but there is one person in the world whom it makes me happy to know that I do understand, and that is you! Clever chap, aren’t I, when there isn’t a drop of Anglo-Saxon blood in you?”
“You are cleverer even than you know, dear Andrew,” she whispered.
CHAPTER XVII
Mrs. Max Drayton, in the seclusion of her drawing-room, was rather a shock to her unexpected visitor. She had kicked off one shoe, and there was a visibly hole in her thin silk stocking. Her negligee robe did little to conceal underclothes of somewhat violent hue, and her unrestrained hair more frankly than ever acknowledged the cruder arts of the coiffeur. She started to her feet, as Félice was ushered in by the untidy serving maid, and laid her cigarette upon an ash tray.
“Why—my lady!” she gasped. “I wasn’t expecting you, down here!”
Félice smiled as pleasantly as she could.
“I was obliged to come and see you, Mrs. Drayton,” she explained. “There is bad news which I think you should be told. I have seen your husband’s lawyer, and I know now that what we spoke of and feared might happen on your last visit is actually coming to pass. Your husband will be charged with the murder of the Comte de Besset.”
The woman lost all her awkwardness in a storm of passion.
“Blast them!” she cried, clenching her hands until the finger nails bit into her flesh. “I knew they’d do it—the brutes! They’ll lay it on to him if they can do it—blast them!”
“Sit down,” Félice begged. “We must talk about this quietly.”
“Quietly!” the woman shrieked. “Could you talk about it quietly if it was your husband or your fancy man they’d got hold of? I know ‘em, these cops. They’ve got no conscience. They gets hold of a man like my Max, who’s got what they call a shady past, and sooner than confess they can’t catch the right one, they’ll do him in. All criminals are alike to them—a sneak thief or a murderer. It’s the job of the police to get some one to swing, and tHey ain’t squeamish how they do it.”
“I do not think that it is quite as bad as that,” Félice expostulated. “Your husband is to^be charged, but that does not mean for certain that he will be found guilty. You must remember that there are a judge and jury to be convinced.”
“What are you going to do about it, my lady?” the woman demanded. “Now then! We’re fair up against it, both of us. If it wasn’t my man who fired that shot, maybe it was yours, and you know it. Sympathy’s all very well. Are you going to let my man hang?”
“Certainly I am not if I can help it,” Félice assure her. “Do please calm yourself. Should I have come here to talk to you if I had not wished your husband well?”
The woman sank reluctantly into a chair. Her fit of fury was passing. She covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth, sobbing.
“It is a very terrible affair,” Félice continued gently, “but, Mrs. Drayton, I do not think that your husband will be found guilty. I have come here to tell you that so that you need not worry. May I ask for one of your cigarettes?”
The woman sat up and pushed the cardboard box across the table.
“There’re only Three Castles, my lady,” she apologised, dabbing at her eyes with an unwholesome-looking piece of cambric,—“not your class at all, I know, but maybe you won’t mind for once.”
“I will smoke one with pleasure,” Félice declared, stretching out her hand. “Thank you. I think that Virginian tobacco is very agreeable for a change… . . And now, I have several things to say to you, Mrs. Drayton. Promise me that you will not be offended.”
“I don’t mind anything,” the woman replied, “so long as you ain’t telling me that you’re going to leave my Max in the lurch and swear you saw him do what he didn’t.”
“That I surely will not,” Félice promised. “What I wanted to know was whether I could be of any use to you in the way of money. You told me that your husband was getting Sir Richard Cotton to defend him, and my husband tells me that Sir Richard gets very large sums for his work.”
“That’s true enough, my lady,” was the doleful rejoinder. “Max has got a bit of money put away somewhere, but I don’t rightly know where it is. Most of what we’ve got in the bank I’ve made over to Sir Richard, and there are the bills, of course, and living. Mind you, Sir Richard’s not a hard man,” she acknowledged. “He’ll take what you can afford, but the gentry’s like us, after all. They don’t care about working for nothing, and if it’s going to be a matter of life and death one doesn’t want to be stingy.”
“I have spoken to my husband about this,” Félice went on. “I have told him that notwithstanding anything any one can say, I do not believe that your husband killed the Comte de Besset. I asked him for some money for you and I have brought it with me— five hundred pounds. You must please let me leave it. It is my husband’s wish as well as my own.”
“It would come in very useful,” the woman admitted, with a covetous gleam in her eyes. “What I should do, my lady, would be to give Sir Richard another two hundred and keep