The letter was of considerable length. It was from Mrs. Foster and in it she had seen fit to give expression to all the thoughts about her husband which had crowded her bosom for the last twenty years; there had been a good many such thoughts, and Mrs. Foster had done her conscientious best not to omit a single one. The result would have been surprising to a complete stranger; to Mr. Foster it was paralysing. But not so paralysing as the end of this remarkable effusion. The end ran as follows:— “All this I’ve put up with, because I knew it only arose out of your inordinate conceit, self-satisfaction, and egotism, and was not really based on wickedness. But when it comes to your keeping a mistress in a tool-shed at the bottom of the garden, then things have reached their limit. Thanks to the money you have settled on me from time to time, I am financially independent. I am therefore leaving you for good and going up to London at once. Don’t try to follow me, because you won’t find me, and in any case I never want to set eyes on you again. Even if you do find me, nothing will ever induce me to live with you again, and if you want me to divorce you so that you can marry your mistress, I shall only be too delighted to do so; you can communicate with me, on that subject only, through our solicitors —Agatha.” Chapter XVI. Mr. Priestley Bursts a Bombshell For two whole days’ time, in so far as the Duffley mystery was concerned, stood still. Guy and Mr. Doyle, racking their brains in vain, were able to establish only one definite fact: Mr. Foster remained mysteriously absent from his home. Mrs. Foster, added the maid who gave them this information, was also absent. The conspirators’ uneasiness grew. Apparently Mr. Foster, still under arrest, was being held for some obscure reason. What that reason might be they could not imagine, except that it was almost too good to be true that it could be the one for which they had been working. In fact, the only thing about which the two felt quite sure was that this was not the end of all things, but merely a lull before a storm out of which almost anything might emerge. It would be too much to say that Guy and Mr. Doyle were losing their nerve; it would not be too much to say that they realised matters had slipped out of their own grasp and they rather wished they hadn’t. Nor did Cynthia’s attitude help them. With a pertinacity worthy of Cassandra she continued to prophesy disaster, and spent most of her time coming to Guy to ask him what he wanted done about this, that, and the other, “when they were all in prison.”