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.
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