Page:Bat Wing 1921.djvu/259

Rh, arrogant figure he made, uncannily like the Velasquez in the library.

At the face of Madame de Stämer I looked long and searchingly. She had not neglected the art of the toilette. Blinds tempered the sunlight which flooded her room; but that, failing the service of rouge, Madame had been pale this morning, I perceived immediately. In some subtle way the night had changed her. Something was gone out of her face, and something come into it. I thought, and lived to remember the thought, that it was thus Marie Antoinette might have looked when they told her how the drums had rolled in the Place de la Revolution on that morning of the twenty-first of January.

“Oh, M. Knox,” she said, sadly, “you are there, I see. Come and sit here beside me, my friend. Val, dear, remain. Is this Inspector Aylesbury who wishes to speak to me?”

The Inspector, who had entered with all the confidence in the world, seemed to lose some of it in the presence of this grand lady, who was so little impressed by the dignity of his office.

She waved one slender hand in the direction of a violet brocaded chair.

“Sit down, Monsieur l’inspecteur,” she commanded, for it was rather a command than an invitation.

Inspector Aylesbury cleared his throat and sat down.

“Ah, M. Knox!” exclaimed Madame, turning to me with one of her rapid movements, “is your friend afraid to face me, then? Does he think that he has failed? Does he think that I condemn him?”

“He knows that he has failed, Madame de Stämer,” I replied, “but his absence is due to the fact that at this hour he is hot upon the trail of the assassin.”