As Joan told her story, Ellery could not help saying to himself that it looked bad for old Walter. He did not know Walter Brooklyn very well; but all he did know was unfavourable, and he had never heard any one—even Joan herself—say a good word for him. Left to his own reflections, Ellery would not have hesitated to suspect Walter Brooklyn of murder; for he realised at once that the wicked uncle had everything to gain by putting his two nephews out of the way. But Joan knew the man, and he did not; and, if Joan was positive, that was good enough for him. He was so completely under her influence that the idea that Walter Brooklyn was guilty was dismissed almost as soon as it was entertained. Ellery would make it his business to get Walter Brooklyn cleared—he would work for the old beast with the feeling that he was working for Joan himself. Entering at once into Joan’s plan, he applauded her determination to go and see her stepfather, and placed himself unreservedly at her service. “You’re a dear,” she said. While they had been discussing Walter Brooklyn’s story, Ellery’s embarrassment had quite left him; but these words of Joan’s, and her look as she spoke them, brought it back in double force. He felt the blood rushing to his head, and became uncomfortably aware that he was going red in the face. Also, he could not take his eyes off Joan, and somehow it seemed that she could not take her eyes off him. They gazed at each other, with something of fear and something of embarrassment in their looks, and each was conscious of a heart beating more and more insistently within. For at least a minute neither of them spoke. Then Ellery said one word and put out his hand towards her. “Joan,” he said, and his voice sounded to him strange and unreal. He felt her hand grasp his, almost fiercely, and an acute sensation—it has no name—ran right through him at the touch. In an instant, her head was on his shoulder and his arms were round her. She was sobbing, and his cheek was caressing hers. “Poor darling,” he said at last. Joan had meant that talk with Robert Ellery to be so practical, so entirely the opening of a business partnership. She and Bob were to clear her stepfather together; and, when they had done that, who knew what might come after? But there was to be no intrusion of sentiment until the work in hand was completed. In the event, things had not gone off at all as she intended. From the moment of his coming, she had felt a sense of danger—something poignant, yet intensely welcome—in their meeting. This feeling had been dispelled for the time while she told him her tale, and she had half said to herself that now she was safe. Then, in a moment, security had vanished, the sense of tension had come back far more strongly than before, she had felt herself merely a passive thing—as he was another passive thing—in the control of great elemental forces beyond herself. Without a word said, it seemed, a marriage had been arranged.