“But it is marvellous!” she exclaimed. “One would need to be a sorcerer to know so much! It is quite true, what you say. Now that Staveley is dead, I can espouse such a good friend of mine, one who will be kind to me and whom I have been adoring for so long. I can hardly believe it, I am so happy.” Sir Clinton smiled. “And you would like everyone else to be happy too? Then you will perhaps begin at once. Go upstairs, madame, and ask to see Mrs. Fleetwood. Say that I sent you. And when you see her, tell her that you married Staveley in 1915. You do not need to say any more.” Rather puzzled, but quite anxious to do as he told her, Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux bade them both farewell, and they saw her ascending the stair. Sir Clinton gazed after her. “Easy enough to guess that riddle. One gets a reputation on the cheap sometimes. Her association with Staveley; then her complete separation for years; then this sudden need to meet him again in order to side-track some ‘embarrassments’: obviously she had married him, and needed a divorce if she was to marry again. I wish most problems were as simple.” “And, of course, if she married Staveley in 1915, as she seems to have done, he committed bigamy in marrying Mrs. Fleetwood?” “Which means that Mrs. Fleetwood _is_ Mrs. Fleetwood, and that she's legally married now. She won't be sorry to hear it. That's why I sent Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux up there now. First-hand evidence is better than documents; and, of course, the documents will be forthcoming if they're required in future. Evidently those three scoundrels didn't know this latest twist in the affair, or they wouldn't have tried the trick they did last night. They'd have done worse, probably, when they got hold of her. If she'd been dead and out of the way, there would have been no one except old Miss Fordingbridge to contest that impostor's claim—and she was so besotted with him that she'd never have dreamed of doing so.” He paused for a moment or two, as though considering the case; but when he spoke again it was on a different point. “You sometimes jeer at me for playing the mystery-man and refusing to tell you what I infer from the facts that turn up. It's sometimes irritating, I admit; and now and again I suppose it makes me look as if I were playing the superior fellow. But it's really nothing of the sort. In affairs of this kind, one never can tell what the next turn of the wheel may be; and one might quite well blurt out something which would give the cue to the very people you want to keep in the dark.” “You do irritate me often enough, Clinton,” Wendover admitted. “I can't see why you shouldn't put your cards on the table. A fact's a fact, after all.”