they were used in war and the chase, weren't they? Every one of them has given agony, every one would be red, if we saw it in its true color."
Red was also the color of Furneaux's cheek-bones at the moment—red as hectic; and he was conscious of it, as he was conscious also that his eyes were wildly alight. Hence, he continued a long time bending over the "celts" so that Miss Prout might not see his face. His voice, however, was calm, since he habitually spoke in jerky, clipped syllables that betrayed either no emotion or too much.
When he turned round, it was to move straight to a little rack on the left, in which glittered a fine array of daggers—Japanese kokatanas, punals of Salamanca, cangiars of Morocco, bowie-knives of old California, some with squat blades, coming quickly to a point, some long and thin to transfix the body, others meant to cut and gash, each with its label of minute writing.
Furneaux's eye had duly noted them before, but he had passed them without stopping. Now, after seeing the celts, he went back to them.
To his surprise, Miss Prout did not come with him. She stood looking on the ground, her lower lip somewhat protruded, silent, obviously distrait.
"And these, Miss Prout?" chirped he, "are they of high value?"
She neither answered nor moved.
"Perhaps you haven't studied their history?" ventured Furneaux again.
Now, all at once, she moved to the rack of daggers, and without saying a word, tapped with the fore-finger of her right hand, and kept on tapping, a vacant hole in the rack, though her eyes peered deeply into Furneaux's face. And for the first time Furneaux made acquaintance with the real splendor of her eyes—eyes that lived in sleep, torpid like the dormouse; but when they woke, woke to such a lambency of passion that they fascinated and commanded like the basilisk's.
With eyes so alight she now kept peering at Furneaux, standing tall above him, tapping at the empty hole.
"Oh, I see," muttered Furneaux, his eyes, too, alight like live coals, "there's an article missing here, also—one from the celts, one from the daggers."
"He is innocent!" suddenly cried Hylda Prout, in a tempest of passionate reproach.
"She loves him," thought Furneaux.
And the girl thought: "He knew before now that these things were missing. His acting would deceive every man, but not every woman. How glad I am that I drew him on!"
Now, though the fact of the discovery of the celt by Inspector Clarke under the dead actress's piano had not been published in the papers, the fact that she had been stabbed through the eye by a long blade with blunt edges was known to all the world. There was nothing strange in this fierce outburst of Osborne's trusted secretary, nor that tears should spring to her eyes.
"Mr. Furneaux, he is innocent," she wailed in a frenzy. "Oh, he is! You noticed me hesitate just now to bring you in here: well, this was the reason—this, this, this——" she tapped with her forefinger on the empty hole—"for I knew that you would see this, and I knew that you would be jumping to some terrible conclusion as to Mr. Osborne."
"Conclusion, no," murmured Furneaux comfortingly—"I avoid conclusions as traps for the unwary. Interesting, of course, that's all. Tell me what you know, and fear nothing. Conclusion, you say! I don't jump to conclusions. Tell me what was the shape of the dagger that has disappeared."
She was silent again for many seconds. She was wrung with doubt, whether to speak or not to speak.
At last she voiced her agony.
"Either I must refuse to say, or I must tell the truth—and if I tell the truth, you will think——"
She stopped again, all her repose of manner fled.
"You don't know what I will think," put in Furneaux. "Sometimes I think the most unexpected things. The best way is to give me the plain facts. The question is, whether the blade that has gone from there was shaped like the one supposed to have committed the crime in the flat?"
"It was labeled 'Saracen Stiletto: about 1150,'" muttered the girl brokenly, looking Furneaux straight in the face, though the fire was now dead in her eyes. "It had a square bone handle, with a crescent carved on one of the four faces—a longish, thin blade, like a skewer, only not round—with blunt-edged corners to it."
Furneaux took up a little tube containing radium from a table at his hand, looked at it, and put it down again.
Hylda Prout was too distraught to see that his hand shook a little. It was half a minute before he spoke.
"Well, all that proves nothing, though it is of interest, of course," he said nonchalantly. "How long has that stiletto been lying there?"
"Since—since I entered Mr. Osborne's employment, twelve months ago."
"And you first noticed that it was gone—when?"
"On the second afternoon after the murder, when I noticed that the celt, too, was gone."
"The second—I see."
"I wondered what had become of them! I could imagine that Mr. Osborne might have given the celt to some friend. But the stiletto was so rare a thing—I couldn't think that he would give that. I assumed—I assume—that they were stolen. But, then, by whom?"
"That's the question," said Furneaux.
"Was it this same stiletto that I have described to you that the murder was done with?" asked Hylda.
"Now, how can I tell that?" said Furneaux. "I wasn't there, you know."
"Was not the weapon, then, found in the unfortunate woman's flat?"
"No—no weapon."
"Well, but that is excessively odd," she said in a low voice.
"Why so excessively odd?" demanded Furneaux.
"Why? Because—don't you see?—the weapon would be blood-stained—of course; and I should expect that after committing his horrid deed, the murderer would be only too glad to get rid of it, and would leave it——"
"Oh, come, that is hardly a good guess, Miss Prout. I shall never make a lady detective of you. Murderers don't leave their weapons about behind them, for weapons are clews, you see."
He was well aware that if the fact of the discovery of the celt had been published in the papers, Hylda might justly have answered: "But this murderer did leave one of his weapons behind, namely the celt; and it is excessively odd that, since he left one, the smaller one, he did not leave the other, the larger one."
As it was, the girl took thought, and her comment was shrewd enough:
"All murderers do not act in the same way, for some are a world more cunning and alert than others. I say that it is odd that the murderer did not leave behind the weapon that pierced the woman's eye, and I will prove it to you. If the stiletto was stolen from Mr. Osborne—and it really must have been stolen—and if that was the same stiletto that the deed was done with, then, the motive of the thief in stealing it was to kill Mademoiselle de Bercy with it. But why should one steal a weapon to commit a murder? And why should the murderer have chosen Mr. Osborne to steal his weapon from? Obviously, because he wanted to throw the suspicion upon him—in which case he would naturally leave the weapon behind as proof of Mr. Osborne's guilt. Now, then, have I proved my point?"
Though she spoke almost in italics, and was pale and flurried, she looked jauntily at Furneaux, with her head tossed back; and he, with half a smile, answered:
"I withdraw my remark as to your detective qualifications, Miss Prout. Yes, I think you reason well. If there was a thief, and the thief was the murderer, he would very likely have acted as you say."
"Then, why was the stiletto not found in the flat?" she asked.
"The fact that it was not found would seem to show that there was not a thief," he said; and he added quickly: "Perhaps Mr. Osborne gave it, as well as the celt, to