Jean le Roi lifted his head and gazed curiously at Stephen Hurd. "So you," he murmured, "are my brother-in-law?" Johnson leaned once more across the table. "It is where you, where we all have been deceived," he said impressively. "Listen. She was never the daughter of Stephen Hurd at all. It was a schoolgirl's freak to take that name, when she was eluding her chaperon and amusing herself in Paris. Stephen Hurd was her servant." "And she?" Jean le Roi asked softly. Johnson spread out his yellow-stained fingers. His voice trembled, his eyes shone. It was like speaking of something holy. "She is a great lady," he said. "She goes to Court, she has houses, and horses and carriages, troops of servants, a yacht, motor-cars. She is rich--fabulously rich, Jean. She has--listen--forty thousand pounds, livres mind, a year." "More than that," Hurd muttered. "More than that," Johnson repeated. Jean le Roi was no longer unmoved. He drew a long breath and his teeth seemed to come together with a click. "There is no mistake?" he asked softly. "An income of forty thousand pounds?" "There is no mistake," Stephen Hurd assured him. "I will answer for that." Jean le Roi's face was white and vicious. Yet for a time he said nothing and his two companions watched him anxiously. There was something uncanny about his silence. "It is a great deal of money," he said at last. "Often in prison I was hungry, I had no cigarettes. I was forced to drink water. A great deal of money! And she is my wife! Half of what she has belongs to me! That is the law, eh?" "I don't know about that," Stephen Hurd said, "but she has certainly treated you very badly." Jean le Roi struck the table with his fist, not violently, and yet somehow with a force which made itself felt. "It is over--that!" he said. "I am a man who knows when he has been ill-treated; who knows, too, what it is that a wife owes to her husband. Tell me where it is that she lives, old man. Write it down." Johnson drew from his pocket a stump of pencil and the back of an envelope. He wrote slowly and with care. Jean le Roi extended the palm of his hand to Stephen Hurd. "He will warn madame, perhaps," he suggested. "Why does he sit here with us, this young man? Is it that he, too, wants money?" "No! no! my son," Johnson intervened hastily. "Madame treated him badly. He would not be sorry to see her humiliated." Jean le Roi smiled. "It shall be done," he promised. "But from one of you I must have money. I cannot present myself before my wife so altered. No one would believe my story." "How much do you want?" Hurd asked uneasily. "Twenty pounds English," Jean le Roi answered. "I cannot resume my appearance as a gentleman on less." Hurd took out some notes. "I will lend you that," he said slowly. Jean le Roi's long fingers took firm hold of the notes. He buttoned them up in his pocket, slapped the place where they were, and poured out more brandy.