At the landing stage Watts helped Mrs. Erskine into a taxi, and drove her off to the villa. Pointer himself, Mrs. Clark, and the men of the party walking to the police station close at hand, while Carter took Christine to the Chief Inspector's hotel, where a sympathetic maid and landlady diagnosed her case as an attack of sea-sickness and helped her to bed. Carter left her door reluctantly, he would have liked to stand on guard all night after what had so nearly happened, but a confidence in Pointer was beginning to reassure him where it was a question of that police-officer's orders. At the villa he found the servants flitting uneasily about, like bats. They connected all these strange goings on with the loss of the emerald pendant and were in secret mutiny. Carter was asked to join Monsieur Pointer in the drawing-room, where he found only Mrs. Erskine lying on the chaise-lounge looking very ill, and Watts. Pointer was just laying down a packet of legal-looking papers on the table beside her. “Here they are. Will-forms taken from the major's pocket. If you don't understand their significance, Madame; but I see you do”—for Mrs. Erskine was staring with dilated eyes at them. “It would have taken some persuasion doubtless to make you sign away your fortune to any one of your three friends, but—as I think you know—they would have ways of persuading you, and whether the will would have been valid wouldn't have interested you, once you had followed Miss West to the bottom of the Mediterranean. It would have been so easy to connect the two ‘accidents.’ Miss West overbalanced, and you falling over in an effort to save her. True, your friends might have had a few awkward questions to answer; but, after all, the French courts will decide on the question of the attempted murder of Miss West, that's none of my business for the moment.” Pointer took a step forward—“This is my real reason for being here to-night. Janet Fraser, you are detained, pending an extradition order, for the murder of Robert Erskine, and for the embezzlement of the Erskine funds under false pretences for over seventeen years. It's my . . .” There was a shriek from the woman to whom he was speaking. She sprang to her feet and looked around her as if demented, as indeed she was by the shock—for the moment. “The devils! They've sold me! After all the money they've squeezed from me they've sold me in the end. Sold me!” She screeched, arching her back and advancing in a horribly feline sidle. “What else did you expect?” Pointer asked imperturbably. “But it's my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you.” “My God, Mrs. Erskine!” Watts murmured, while Carter felt as though the solid floor had opened under his feet.