"By Jove! I had never regarded it in that light before!" he gasped. "But what about the weapon?"

"You might easily have hidden it before the arrival of the police. You admit that you went out on the veranda. Therefore if they do chance to find the weapon in the garden then their suspicions will, no doubt, be considerably increased. It's a pity, old man, that you didn't make a clean breast of the motive of your visit."

"I now see my horrible mistake," Henfrey admitted. "I thought myself wise to preserve silence, to know nothing, and now I see quite plainly that I have only brought suspicion unduly upon myself. The police, however, know Yvonne Ferad to be a somewhat mysterious person."

"Which renders the situation only worse," Brock said. Then, after a pause, he added: "Now that you have declined to tell the police why you visited the Villa Amette and have, in a way, defied them, it will be best to maintain that attitude. Tell them nothing, no matter what happens."

"I intend to pursue that course. But the worst of it is, Walter, that the doctors hold out no hope of Mademoiselle's recovery. I saw Duponteil half an hour ago, and he told me that he could give me no encouraging information. The bullet has been extracted, but she is hovering between life and death. I suppose it will be in the papers to-morrow, and Dorise and her mother will know of my nocturnal visit to the house of a notorious woman."

"Don't let that worry you, my dear chap. Here, they keep the news of all tragedies out of the papers, because shooting affairs may be thought by the public to be due to losses at the Rooms. Recollect that of all the suicides here--the dozens upon dozens of poor ruined gamesters who are yearly laid to rest in the Suicides' Cemetery--not a single report has appeared in any newspaper. So I think you may remain assured that Lady Ranscomb and her daughter will not learn anything."

"I sincerely hope they won't, otherwise it will go very hard with me," Hugh said in a low, intense voice. "Ah! What a night it has been for me!"

"And if Mademoiselle dies the assailant, whoever he was, will be guilty of wilful murder; while you, on your part, will never know the truth concerning your father's death," remarked the elder man, running his fingers through his hair.

"Yes. That is the position of this moment. But further, I am suspected of the crime!"

Brock dressed while his friend sat upon the edge of the bed, pale-faced and agitated. Suppose that the assailant had flung his pistol into the bushes, and the police eventually discovered it? Then, no doubt, he would be put across the frontier to be arrested by the police of the Department of the Alpes Maritimes.




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