“I discovered the existence of the Woman in this way: I searched Hoode’s desk in suspicion of a hidden drawer. I found one and in it a diary (of no use save to corroborate the fact of some of those races), and a bunch of newspaper-cuttings. But I knew—how is no matter—that something was missing from that drawer. “What that something was I did not know. I only knew that it was most probably of importance. So I searched the house—and found it. A packet of letters from the Woman. As I was by then up to the neck in the unspeakable nasty work of the Private Inquiry Agent, I read them. Who the woman is will not be set down here. It is my hope that not even in court shall I have to give her name. “I sought her and talked with her. Put briefly and brutally her replies were that I was correct in assuming that she had been Hoode’s mistress, and that I was also right (this was a shot in black dark) in assuming that she knew Sir Arthur Digby-Coates. She did not, it seemed, have any affection for the gentleman. She made it plain to me, under some pressure, that Sir Arthur had wished her to stand in the relation to him that she subsequently did to John Hoode. But a (shrug of distaste) Sir Arthur had been sent packing—and quickly. “Is not that enough, when added to those other and perpetual defeats of the past five-and-thirty years, to show the reason for hatred in the mind of the egoist? Consider the history of the matter. First, boyish jealousy and a determination to win next time; then the gradual process of realisation that strive as he would he would never reach a common goal before his rival; then the slow at first but increasingly fast transition from healthy jealousy to dislike, from dislike to utter hatred. Then, at last, with the crowning loss of the Woman, the monomania—for this is what the hatred is grown—takes a firmer hold and becomes a fire so fierce that only the complete elimination of the hated man will quench it. “So much for reasons why Digby-Coates should have hated Hoode. Now for corroboration that such hatred actually existed. “I wrote just now of certain newspaper-cuttings which I found in the hidden drawer of Hoode’s desk. These were a bunch of twenty-four, taken from various issues (all bearing dates within the last two years) of _The Searchlight_, _The St. Stephen’s Gazette_, and _Vox Populi_. Every one of the cuttings was a leading or almost equally prominent article attacking the Minister of Reconstruction in no half-hearted way.