"Do you?" Rachel said, dimly hearing his flow of words while she made up her mind what her own were to be. She had had so little time to form her plan of action, to piece together all that she had been hearing during the afternoon, that it was not yet clear to her that from the circumstances of the case Pateley must necessarily be concerned in it; and at the moment she began to speak she simply looked upon him as some one who knew Rendel in London, who had known her father and mother, who had a general air of bluff and hearty serviceability, and had presented himself at a moment when she had no one else to turn to. "Mr. Pateley," she said, and at the sudden ring of resolution in her tone Pateley's face changed and his smiling flow of chatter about nothing came to a pause. "There is something I want very much to ask you about," she went on, "something I want your help in." "I am at your orders," said Pateley, with a smile and bow that concealed his surprise. "It is something that matters very, very much," Rachel went on. "Something you could find out for me." Pateley said nothing. "I don't know if you know," she went on hurriedly--"if you heard, of what happened to me in London just before my father died? I had an accident. It seemed a slight one at the time. I fell down on the stairs one evening that he was worse when I ran down quickly to fetch my husband, and I had concussion of the brain afterwards and was unconscious for forty-eight hours. And since, I have not been able to remember anything of what happened during those days." Pateley made a sort of sympathetic sound and gesture. "But," Rachel said, "I have heard to-day--not until to-day--of something that happened during that time, something terrible. I am going to tell it to you, in the greatest confidence. You will see when I tell you that it matters very, very much. First of all,--this I remember--on the day my father began to be worse, Lord Stamfordham brought my husband some papers to copy for him in which was the Agreement with Germany, and told him no one was to know about them, and my husband told no one, and sent them back, when they were done, to Stamfordham, in a sealed packet." Pateley, as he listened, sat absolutely impenetrable, with his eyes fixed on the ground. "But somebody got hold of them," she went on--"somebody must have stolen them, because they were published the next morning in the paper, in the _Arbiter_." And as the words left her lips she suddenly realised that the man in front of her was the one of all others in the world who must know what had happened. The _Arbiter_ was embodied in Pateley, it was Pateley: that, everybody knew, everybody repeated. Pateley would, he must, be able to tell her. "Oh," she cried, "the _Arbiter_ is your paper!" "Yes," said Pateley, looking at her. "Then," she said, "you know--you must know." "Know what?" he said calmly. "You must know," she said, "who it was told the _Arbiter_ what was in those papers."