Page:The Black Camel (IA blackcamel0000earl).djvu/235

The girl was weeping softly. “Yes, I guess I might as well tell you. I’m so sorry you know all that. I’d have given anything to keep Denny Mayo out of this.”

“You were aware, then, of that scandal in Miss Fane’s past?”

“I suspected that something was terribly wrong, but I didn’t know what. I was quite young—I had just come to Shelah—at the time of Denny’s—accident. On the night it happened, Shelah arrived home in a state of hysteria, and I was there alone with her. I took care of her the best I could. For weeks she wasn’t herself. I knew that in some way she was connected with Mayo’s murder, but until this moment, I never learned the facts. I was young, as I say, but I knew better than to ask questions.”

“Coming to yesterday——” Chan prompted.

“It was just as I told you—yesterday morning she said she must get hold of money at once, and she gave me the ring to sell. Then she went down to the Grand Hotel to see Tarneverro, and when she came back she was sort of hysterical again. She sent for me to come to her room—she was walking the floor. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. ‘He’s a devil, Julie,’ she cried. ‘That Tarneverro’s a devil—I wish I had never sent for him. He told me things about Tahiti and on the boat—how could he know—he frightened me. And I’ve done something terribly foolish, Julie—I must have been mad.’ She became rather incoherent then. I asked her what it was all about. ‘Get the emerald,’ she told me. ‘We mustn’t sell it, Julie. Denny’s name is inside it, and I don’t want any mention of that name now.’”

“She was hysteric, you say?”