"He's so mistaken in what he's doing!" she said. "I don't understand him--really. You know how devoted to me he is. He called me into his room again an hour or two ago and tried to comfort me. He said he had reason to know everything would come out as it should. But he looked so--so uncertain!--Oh, Mr. Hastings, who did kill that woman?"

"I think I'll be able to prove who did it--let's see," he spoke with a light cheerfulness, and at the same time with sincerity; "I'll be able to prove it in less than a week after Mrs. Brace takes that money from you."

She said nothing to that, and he leaned forward sharply, peering at her face, illegible to him in the darkness of the verandah.

"So much depends on that, on you," he added. "You won't fail me--tomorrow?"

"I'll do my best," she said, earnestly, struggling against depression.

"She must take that money," he declared with great emphasis. "She must!"

"And you think she will?"

"Miss Sloane, I know she will," he said, a fatherly encouragement in his voice. "I'm seldom mistaken in people; and I know I've judged this woman correctly. Money's her weakness. Love of it has destroyed her already.

Offering this bribe to anybody else situated as she is would be ridiculous--but she--she'll take it."

Lucille sat a long time on the verandah after Hastings had gone. She was far more depressed than he had suspected; she had to endure so much, she thought--the suspense, which grew heavier as time went by; the notoriety; Berne Webster still in danger of his life; her father's inexplicable pose of indifference toward everything; the suspicions of the newspapers and the public of both her father and Berne; and the waiting, waiting, waiting--for what?

A little moan escaped her.

What if Mrs. Brace did take the marked money? What would that show? That she was acting with criminal intent, Hastings had said. But he had another and more definite object in urging her to this undertaking; he expected from it a vital development which he had not explained--she was sure. She worried with that idea.

Her confidence in Hastings had been without qualification. But what was he doing? Anything? Judge Wilton was forever saying, "Trust Hastings; he's the man for this case." And that was his reputation; people declared that, if anybody could get to the bottom of all this mystery, he could. Yet, two whole days had pa.s.sed since the murder, and he had just said another week might be required to work out his plan of detection--whatever that plan was.

Another week of this! She put her hot palms to her hotter temples, striving for clarity of thought. But she was dazed by her terror--her isolated terror, for some of her thoughts were such that she could share them with n.o.body--not even Hastings.

"If the sheriff makes no arrest within the next few days, I'll be out of the woods," he had told her. "Delay is what I want."

There, again, was discouragement, for here was the sheriff threatening to serve a warrant on Berne within the next twenty-four hours! She had heard Crown make the threat, and to her it had seemed absolutely final: unless her father revealed something which Crown wanted, whether her father knew it or not, Berne was to be subjected to this humiliation, this added blow to his chance for recovery!

She sprang up, throwing her hands wide and staring blindly at the stars.

The woman whom she was to bribe cast a deep shadow on her imagination.

Sharing the feeling of many others, she had reached the reluctant conclusion that Mrs. Brace in some way knew more than anybody else about the murder and its motives. It was, she told herself, a horrid feeling, and without reason. But she could not shake it off. To her, Mrs. Brace was a figure of sinister power, an agent of ugliness, waiting to do evil--waiting for what?

By a great effort, she steadied her jangled nerves. Hastings was counting on her. And work--even work in the dark--was preferable to this idleness, this everlasting summing-up of frightful possibilities without a ray of hope. She would do her best to make that woman take the money!

Tomorrow she would be of real service to Berne Webster--she would atone, in some small measure, for the sorrow she had brought upon him, discarding him because of empty gossip!--Would he continue to love her?--Perhaps, if she had not discarded him, Mildred Brace would not have been murdered.

A groan escaped her. She fled into the house, away from her thoughts.

XVI

THE BRIBE

It was nine o'clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that she had entered the Walman un.o.bserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace's apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she would use in the interview confronting her.

The constant thought at the back of her brain was that she would succeed; she would speak and act in such a way that Mrs. Brace would take the money. She was buoyed by a fierce determination to be repaid for all the suspense, all the agony of heart, that had weighed her down throughout this long, leaden-footed day--the past twenty-four hours unproductive of a single enlightening incident.

Mrs. Brace opened the door and, with a scarcely perceptible nod of the head, motioned her into the living room. Neither of them spoke until they had seated themselves on the chairs by the window. Even then, the silence was prolonged, until Lucille realized that her tongue was dry and uncomfortably large for her mouth. An access of trembling shook her.

She tried to smile and knew that her lips were twisting in a ghastly grin.

Mrs. Brace moved slowly to and fro on the armless rocker, her swift, appraising eyes taking in her visitor's distress. The smooth face wore its customary, inexpressive calm. Lucille, striving desperately to arrive at some opinion of what the woman thought, saw that she might as well try to find emotion in a statue.

"I--I," the girl finally attained a quick, flurried utterance, "want to thank you for--for having this--this talk with me."

"What do you want to talk about, Miss Sloane?"

The low, metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency.

It both angered and encouraged Lucille. She perceived the futility of polite, introductory phrases here; she could go straight to her purpose, be brutally frank. She gave Mrs. Brace a brilliant, disarming smile, a proclamation of fellowship. Her confidence was restored.

"I'm sure we can talk sensibly together, Mrs. Brace," she explained, dissembling her indignation. "We can get down to business, at once."

"What business?" inquired the older woman, with some of the manner Hastings had seen, an air of lying in wait.

"I said, on the 'phone, it was something of advantage to you--didn't I?"

"Yes; you said that."

"And, of course, I want something from you."

"Naturally."

"I'll tell you what it is." Lucille spoke now with cool precision, as yet untouched by the horror she had expected to feel. "It's a matter of money."

Mrs. Brace's tongue came out to the edge of the thin line of her lips.

Her nostrils quivered, once, to the sharply indrawn breath. Her eyes were more furtive.

"Money?" she echoed. "For what?"

"There's no good of my making long explanations, Mrs. Brace," Lucille said. "I've read the newspapers, every line of them, about--our trouble.

And I saw the references to your finances, your lack of money."

"Yes?" Mrs. Brace's right hand lay on her lap; the thumb of it began to move against the forefinger rapidly, the motion a woman makes in feeling the texture of cloth--or the trick of a bank clerk separating paper money.

"Yes. I read, also, what you said about the tragedy. Today I noticed that the only note of newness in the articles in the papers came from you--from your saying that 'in a few days, three or four at the outside'--that was your language, I'm quite sure--you'd produce evidence on which an arrest would be made. I've intelligence enough to see that the public's interest in you is so great, the sympathy for you is so great, that your threats--I mean, predictions, or opinions--colour everything that's written by the reporters. You see?"

"Do I see what?"

Despite her excellent pose of waiting with nothing more than a polite interest, Lucille saw in her a p.r.o.nounced alteration. That was not so much in her face as in her body. Her limbs had a look of rigidity.

"Don't you see what I mean?" Lucille insisted. "I see that you can make endless trouble for us--for all of us at Sloanehurst. You can make people believe Mr. Webster guilty, and that father and I are shielding him. People listen to what you say. They seem to be on your side."