Mary, who readily enough had already guessed the essential hypocrisy of all this play, turned and confronted the Inspector, and answered without the least trace of fear, but with the firmness of knowledge:
Her attitude exasperated Burke. His voice roared out wrathfully.
The music in the tones of the answer was a vocal rebuke.
“Because he didn't do it.” She stated the fact as one without a hint of any contradictory possibility.
“Well, he says he did it!” Burke vociferated, still more loudly.
Mary, in her turn, resorted to a bit of finesse, in order to learn whether or not Garson had been arrested. She spoke with a trace of indignation.
“But how could he have done it, when he went----” she began.
The Inspector fell a victim to her superior craft. His question came eagerly.
Mary smiled for the first time since she had been in the room, and in that smile the Inspector realized his defeat in the first passage of this game of intrigue between them.
“You ought to know,” she said, sedately, “since you have arrested him, and he has confessed.”
Demarest put up a hand to conceal his smile over the police official's chagrin. Gilder, staring always at this woman who had come to be his Nemesis, was marveling over the beauty and verve of the one so hating him as to plan the ruin of his life and his son's.
Burke was frantic over being worsted thus. To gain a diversion, he reverted to his familiar bullying tactics. His question burst raspingly. It was a question that had come to be constant within his brain during the last few hours, one that obsessed him, that fretted him sorely, almost beyond endurance.
Mary rested serene in the presence of this violence. Her answer capped the climax of the officer's exasperation.
“My husband shot a burglar,” she said, languidly. And then her insolence reached its culmination in a query of her own: “Was his name Griggs?” It was done with splendid art, with a splendid mastery of her own emotions, for, even as she spoke the words, she was remembering those shuddering seconds when she had stood, only a few hours ago, gazing down at the inert bulk that had been a man.
Burke betook himself to another form of attack.
“Oh, you know better than that,” he declared, truculently. “You see, we've traced the Maxim silencer. Garson himself bought it up in Hartford.”