“It was not that boy. And that’s why I shall go on thinking and spying and crawling and bullying until I find out who it really was. Now, tell me why you stole those letters.” He moved forward and stood looking down at her. An ugly, dull flush spread over her face. She sat erect. Her colourless eyes flamed. “You think—you _dare_ to think _I_ killed _him_?” she cried in a dreadful whisper. Anthony shook his head. “Not necessarily. I shall know better what I think when you’ve told me what I want to know.” “But what have those foul scratchings to do with—with John’s death?” She pointed a shaking finger at the little package in his hands. “Nothing, everything, or just enough,” said Anthony. “You’re asking me the very questions which I want you, indirectly, to answer.” She said: “I refuse,” and closed tightly the thin-lipped mouth. “Must I force your hand?” he asked. “Very well. You must tell me what I want to know, because, if you don’t, I shall go to Scotland Yard, where I have some small influence, and lay these letters and the story of how I found them before the authorities. You must tell me because, if you don’t, you will lead me to believe that you do, in fact, know something of how your brother met his death. You must tell me because, if you don’t”—he paused, and looked at her until she felt the gaze of the greenish eyes set in the swarthy face to be unbearable—“because, if you don’t,” he repeated, “the contents of these letters and their implication are bound to become known to others beside you and me. You will tell me because to keep that last from happening you would do anything.” Even as he finished speaking he knew that last shot had told, fired though it had been in the dark. The woman crumpled. And in her terror Anthony found her more human than before. “No, no, no!” she whispered. “I’ll tell. I’ll tell.” Anthony stood, waiting. “Did you read those—those letters?” The words came tumbling from her lips in almost unseemly haste. Anthony nodded assent. “Then you must know that this _woman_—the _Thing_ that wrote them was John’s—John’s—mistress.” Again he nodded, watching curiously the emotions that supplanted each other in the nondescript face of his victim. Fear he had seen and anxiety; but now there were both these with horror, indignation, tenderness for the dead, and a fervour of distaste for anything which savoured of “loose living.” He remembered what he had been told of the lady’s rigid dissentingness, and understood. She went on, more confidently now that she had once brought herself to speak of “unpleasantnesses” to this strange man who watched her with his strange eyes.