'Now,' he said, 'sit down. I have a long story and a bad one to tell you. As I said the other night, I am not a good man, Captain Hampton. I have been mixed up in all sorts of shady transactions on the turf at home, and if I had not made a bolt for it should have got seven years for nobbling a horse. I was among a pretty bad lot at New Orleans, and many a sailor was hocussed and robbed at my place, and I pretty near caused your murder; and yet, I tell you, if I had known what a black-hearted villain that man Warbles--or, as he says his name really is, Truscott--was, I would have shot him rather than have taken his hand. First, will you tell me how much you know of him?' Ned Hampton told what he knew of the man; of his disappointment at his not obtaining his father's position of steward at Mr. Hawtrey's, of the threats he had made, and how, as it seemed, he carried out those threats by first giving rise to the rumours that Miss Hawtrey was at the mercy of some one who held damaging letters of hers, and then by causing Linda to personate her in the commission of audacious thefts. 'You don't know half of it,' Murdoch said; 'he told it all to her and me, boasting of the vengeance he had taken. You were a boy of eight when Mr. Hawtrey's wife died--do you remember anything about it?' 'Very little,' Ned replied, after sitting for a minute or two--trying to recall the past. 'I remember there was a great talk about it. She died a week or two after Miss Hawtrey was born. I remember there was a shock, or a loss, or something of that sort, but I do not remember more than that. Oh, yes, I do; I remember there was another baby, and that somehow she and her nurse were drowned.' 'Yes, that was it. Truscott was at the bottom of it; he told us he had been watching for his chance. It seems that when the twins came the mother could not nurse them. Two women were obtained as foster mothers; Truscott got hold of one of them. I believe from what he said she had belonged to the place, but had been away in London and had only returned a month or two, and had had a baby which had died a day or two before Mrs. Hawtrey's were born, and although she had no character they were glad enough to secure her services in the emergency. Truscott, as I said, got hold of her and bribed her heavily to consent to carry out his orders. One evening she pretended to get drunk. She was of course discharged, but being apparently too drunk to be turned out on a wet and wild night, as it happened to be, she was put in a room upstairs and was to be sent away first thing in the morning.