Saltash saw his advantage and pressed it. "If Jake were here, he'd tell you I was speaking the truth, and you'd believe him. You're on a wrong scent. So far as I'm concerned, you're welcome to follow it to blazes. I'm used to pleasantries of that sort from my friends. But I'm damned if I'll let that child be tripped for nothing. Do you hear, Bunny?" He shook the arm he gripped impatiently. "I'll see you in hell first!" Bunny's mouth twisted with a painful effort to smile. "I'm in hell now," he said. "Why the devil did you listen?" said Saltash. "Look here! We've got to have this thing out. Send a man along with my horse and walk across the park with me!" He had gained his point by sheer insistence, and he knew it. Bunny knew it also and cursed himself for a weak fool as he moved to comply. With Saltash's blade through his heart, he yet could somehow find it possible to endure him. He went with him in silence, hating the magnetism he found it impossible to resist. They passed through the shrubberies that skirted the house, and so to the open down. Then in his sudden fashion, crudely and vehemently, Saltash began his defence. "It's not my way," he said, "to give an answer to any man who questions; but you haven't stooped to question. So I tell you the truth. Sheila saw Toby working as a page at the Casino Hotel at Valrosa. That right? I thought so. It's the whole matter in a nutshell. I must have seen her too, but never noticed her till my last night in the place. Then I found Antonio hammering the poor little beggar out in the garden, and I stopped it. You'd have done the same. Afterwards, late that night, I went on board the yacht and found her down in the saloon--a stowaway. The yacht had started. I could have put back. I didn't. You wouldn't have done either. She took refuge with me. I sheltered her. She came to me as a boy. I treated her as such." "You knew?" flung in Bunny. Saltash's grin flashed across his dark features like a meteor through a cloudy sky and was gone. "I--suspected, _mon ami_. But--I did not even tell myself." That part of him that was French--a species of volatile sentimentality--sounded in the words like the echo of a laugh in a minor key. "I made a valet of her. I suffered her to clean my boots and brush my clothes. I kept her in order--with this--upon occasion." He held up the switch he carried. "I don't believe it," said Bunny bluntly.