With an exclamation he rose to his feet and picked up the note-case he had thrown on the table on first entering his bedroom. He drew out her letter and opened the enclosure. He had not read a dozen lines before his worse fears were confirmed. “It is terribly difficult to write this,” it ran, “and yet I must tell some one. I am so desperately afraid of what Edward may do. And the awful thing is that I may be wrong and yet I cannot ask him to explain. If what I think is true and he has kept this from me it is because it would break his heart for me to know. There is some extraordinary mystery behind it all. I can only tell you this, Hatter. I am almost certain that the pen you found after the murder was mine and, the day Edward motored me up to London in the car, I found some of the sequins from Mrs. Draycott’s brown evening-dress between the cushions of the back seat of the car. The papers said she had it on when she was found and she wore it at Staveley the night before she left. And yet I know that the car was in London then! I can’t understand it. But, Hatter, the night before Mrs. Draycott left Staveley I came out of my bedroom to go down to dinner and she and Edward were standing by the door of her room, talking. I must have opened my door very quietly, for they did not hear me, but I heard Mrs. Draycott say: ‘This is the second time you’ve put it off. You know what to expect if you don’t come up to the scratch this time.’ I went back into my room and shut the door and they never saw me. I don’t understand it, Hatter. Edward could not have been at the farm that night. He went up to town that afternoon. My reason tells me that I must be mistaken, and yet, all the time, I know that something is going on, something horrible that I cannot understand. Edward has never been like this over a case before. For once, his nerves are beginning to go back on him. I do not know what to do, but I am haunted by the fear that I may die before the trial is over and that Edward, in his desire to save me, may do something. . . . I do not know what I am writing, Hatter; I am so stupidly weak still and my brain does not seem to work properly; but I want you to show this to Edward and tell him that, for my sake, he must not let John Leslie suffer. I am haunted by the thought that he may be led into doing something utterly unlike everything I know of him, something he may regret to his dying day, and I shall not be here to save him. I am so tired. I cannot write any more, but do your best for me, Hatter.” The letter dropped from Fayre’s nerveless fingers and fluttered to the floor. Shaken with pain and horror as he was, he could still give thanks for two things: Kean had never guessed that his wife knew and had gone to his grave believing that the crime he had committed for her sake had not been in vain, and Sybil had died in ignorance of her first husband’s tragic survival. Chapter XXVII