‘Let it be so. I don’t want to hang him. But I do want to rescue the woman I once fondly loved--for whom I still care more than for any other woman on earth--from a marriage that may end in her misery and untimely death. What must be the fate of such a man as this Chicot, if he is, as you believe, and as I believe, guilty? Either remorse will drive him mad, or he will go on from crime to crime, sinking lower in the scale of humanity. Let me but strip the mask from his face, separate him for ever from his innocent wife, and I am content. To do this I want your aid. Jack Chicot has disappeared from the ken of all who knew him. The man who bore that name is now a gentleman of landed estate, respected and respectable. Will you be disinterested enough to waste a couple of days, and travel over three hundred miles, in order to help me to identify the late adventurer in the present lord of the manor? Your journey shall not cost you sixpence.’ ‘If I go at all, I shall go at my own expense,’ answered Gerard curtly; ‘but you must first show me an adequate reason for doing what you ask.’ ‘To do that I must tell you a long story,’ answered Edward. And then, without mentioning the names of people or of places, he told the story of Jasper Treverton’s will, and of Laura Malcolm’s marriage. The facts, as he stated them, went far to show John Treverton a scheming scoundrel, capable of committing a crime of the darkest kind to further his own interest. ‘The case against him looks black, I admit,’ said Gerard, when Clare had finished. ‘But there is one difficult point in the story. You say that in order to secure the fortune Chicot married the young lady in the January before Madame Chicot’s death. Now if he had made up his mind to get rid of his lawful wife by foul means, why did he not do it before he contracted that marriage instead of afterwards? The crime would have been the same, the danger of detection no greater. The murder committed after the second marriage was an anachronism.’ ‘Who can fathom his motives? He may have had no design against his wife’s life when he married the lady I know. He may have believed it possible to so arrange his life that no one would ever recognise Jack Chicot in the country squire. He may have thought that he could buy his freedom from Madame Chicot. Perhaps it was only when he found that her love, or her jealousy, was not to be hoodwinked that he conceived the idea of murder! No man--assuredly no man of decent antecedents--reaches the lowest depth of iniquity all at once.’ ‘Well,’ sighed Gerard, after a pause, ‘I will go with you and see this man. I had a curious interest in that poor creature’s career. I would have done much to save her from the consequence of her own folly, had it been possible. Yes, I will go with you; I should like to know the end of the story.’