“Then, last January, I caught her. She was at Nice and had been gambling heavily at Monte Carlo. When she wrote to me she was desperate and in such a hurry for the money that she accepted the cheque I sent her. As soon as I ascertained that she had cashed it I knew that I had a hold over her at last. On her return I went to see her and offered her a lump sum down, on condition that she did not molest me again, pointing out that, if she went to Sybil, I was prepared to take the matter into the courts and, on the evidence of the Nice cheque, she would not stand the ghost of a chance if she were sued for blackmail. She had begun to realize that Sybil might die and that I might then prefer exposure to the constant drain on my purse. Anyhow, she gave in, but for nearly a month she haggled over the terms and in the end agreed to accept seven thousand pounds down. “Even then I did not trust her. She was a vindictive woman as well as a greedy one and, as you may imagine, our liking for each other had not progressed during our intercourse. I knew that, in a fit of malice or cupidity, she was capable of burning her boats and going to Sybil. Also, it was anything but convenient for me to realize so large a sum just then. At best, it would cripple me financially for some time to come, and retrenchment of any kind meant discomfort for Sybil. Just before my final interview with Mrs. Draycott I received the news that one of my investments had failed and I realized that I was going to have considerable difficulty in raising the seven thousand.” He paused and sat for a moment in thought, as though he were taking stock of his own past actions and appraising them. Then his eyes drifted to where his wife’s photograph, in its heavy silver frame, stood in the full glare of the reading-lamp. “It was then,” he went on, “that I made up my mind to kill Mrs. Draycott.” Chapter XXV There was a tense silence, broken only by the sound of the distant traffic in Victoria Street. Fayre made an ineffectual effort to speak, but no words came. There was nothing he could say. His mind was a chaos of contending emotions, the strongest of which, even now, was pity: pity for the man who, in his blind arrogance, had wrecked the life of the one being he had hoped to save. Something of what he felt must have reached Kean, for when he spoke again there was a gentler, almost apologetic note in his voice. “I’m sorry, Hatter,” he said. “Of all my friends you are the one I can least afford to lose. If it had not been for Farrer’s appalling blunder in not letting me know in time that the case in which John Leslie was to appear had been postponed things would have turned out very differently. Luck was against me from the beginning.