“Have you come to me with the idea of getting him punished?” asked the detective. He would have dearly loved to aid her in such a laudable object but for the express wishes of Lydon to let sleeping dogs lie. “That is my sole reason. I can give you so much evidence about him and put you in the way of corroborating it without having to appear myself. But, of course, a wife is not allowed to give evidence against her husband in a criminal charge.” “That is the worst of it,” said the artful detective, who wanted to get all he could out of her, to turn her hatred to his own advantage. “But let me know some of the details, and I will see if anything can be done. Let us start with the murder of Calliard. Was Edwards the murderer?” Reluctantly, as it seemed, she had to admit he was not. In the course of her confessions on the subject, she confirmed what Stormont had insisted on to his brother, that murder had never been intended. Edwards had not been on in the final act of the tragedy. As at first resolved upon, it had been a case of simple robbery. She had not even sought the jeweller’s society with the object of blackmailing him, but solely to ascertain his movements. After she had left Paris, two members of the gang had been dispatched to Brussels to wait for the unfortunate man and entrap him. In rendering him senseless, one of the miscreants had given him too strong a dose of chloroform, and it proved fatal. To cover up their crime, they had thrown his body in the river. She had learned these details afterwards from Whitehouse, but she did not know the names of either of the men. Stormont, who was the leading spirit of the gang, and had originally marked down Calliard for a victim, was alone acquainted with their identity. It was always his policy to keep the subordinate members of the association as far apart as possible. They worked in little coteries, and, in the majority of cases, one coterie knew nothing of the other. But dearly as she would have loved to implicate Edwards in the tragedy, she had to confess she could not do so. As a matter of fact he was in Spain on other business when it happened. “Our married life would have been intolerable, but for the fact that we did not spend a great deal of it together; when we did, I suffered physically and mentally,” she explained at this point. “His vile temper vented itself upon me on the slightest provocation, in spite of the fact that both Stormont and Whitehouse frequently intervened on my behalf, and remonstrated with him. When the plot against Wraysbury was hatched, it was a necessary part of it that we should live together. That was a time of terrible torture to me. When it failed, thanks to your intervention, he wreaked his disappointment on me. On the day he left England, frightened by your knowledge, he beat me almost into a state of insensibility.”