Apparently, so far as Poole’s limited knowledge of the subject took him, the Victory Finance Company was in the habit of investing a certain proportion of its money and lending the remainder. The list of investments appeared to have passed Sir Garth’s scrutiny with little criticism, most items having a simple tick against them, and a few the words “discard,” “enlarge,” “concentrate,” “doubtful” and so on. The list of advances was more fully annotated; evidently the banker had been at pains to scrutinize the antecedents and activities of each of the concerns to which the Victory Finance Company had lent money. In all but three cases—the South Wales Pulverization Company, the Nem Nem Sohar Trust, and the Ethiopian and General Development Company—there was a tick against the name, as if Sir Garth had been satisfied of its soundness; in the case of the S. W. Pulverization Company and the Nem Nem Sohar Trust there was a separate sheet of notes for each, ending with the underscored words “_overcapitalized_” in the first case, and “_too political_” in the second. In the case of the Ethiopian and General Development Company there were no such notes. Poole sighed as he finished his scrutiny. “This is going to be deep water for me,” he muttered. A quick scrutiny of the other “Company Boards” jackets showed the detective that Sir Garth had either resigned his seat or was contemplating doing so, or else that the work was of so simple or nominal a character as to be of no importance. The jacket dealing with Fratten’s Bank was clearly too big a subject to be tackled that night—and Poole was extremely doubtful of finding the clue that he was looking for in that well-established concern. There remained the personal letters—the bundle of faded letters in a woman’s hand. Poole felt a guilty sense of intrusion as he opened the first. For nearly an hour he sat, not noticing how the time went on, reading the beautiful and tragic story of a woman’s life—her humiliation, her courage, her love, her deep gratitude to the big-hearted man who had given her a new life. There was nothing in the letters that Poole did not already know, no scrap of help to him in his difficult task, but rare tears of sympathy stood in the detective’s eyes as he reverently returned the last letter to its carefully-treasured envelope. CHAPTER XV “Eau D’Enfer”