'Well, doesn't it strike you there was management about it somewhere? It does me.' 'I have been intimately acquainted with Mr. Howarth my whole life long, and I know him to be incapable of doing anything in the least degree unworthy.' 'Well, I've known him to tell a lie or two--and red-hot ones at that.' 'How dare you say, sir, that Mr. Howarth told you a lie?' 'Look here, my lord, this isn't a question of words, but of fact. How did Mr. Howarth transform a man who, in the morning, was hale and hearty, by the afternoon, into the kind of creature you spoke about--so that, by the night, he was dead? If he's a friend of yours, you'll get him to explain how he did it before he's made to.' 'Mr. Howarth will give you any and every explanation you have a right to demand.' 'My lord, I'm a mouthpiece for this lady. It's her husband we're talking about. A wife has as much right as a brother, not to speak of a brother's friend.' The young gentleman turned to me. 'Surely you cannot seriously suppose that your husband was--as this gentleman seems to suggest--the subject of foul play?' 'My James was well upon the Sunday; you say he died upon the Monday. I don't believe he did die; but if he did die, he was killed.' 'But this is monstrous. If what Mr. FitzHoward says about the condition of your husband's health when you last saw him is correct----' 'It is correct.' 'Then in that case there is something somewhere which I own that I don't understand; but to suggest that it is anything which will not bear the light of day, or which a few words will not make clear--that is absurd. But come with me, and you shall have all the explanation which you can possibly require, probably inside half-an-hour.' 'From Mr. Howarth?' It was Mr. FitzHoward who asked. 'If Mr. Howarth has anything to explain, I am quite sure he will explain it--to the proper person.' 'With your permission, Marchioness'--the man would keep talking to me in that silly way; I wished he wouldn't!--'we'll have this matter settled, once for all, in a proper business manner. His lordship keeps snubbing me, thinking, I suppose, that I'm the sort of person who oughtn't to have anything to do with his aristocratic family; but as I also happen to have had some interest in his brother, the nature of which I'll explain to him a little later on, he won't find that I'm easily snubbed. This is an affair which is not likely to be pleasant to any of us; therefore I say that the sooner we get at the bottom of it, so that we can be quit of it for good and all, the better. So as I say, Marchioness, with your permission I'll go and get those certificates of which I spoke, and I'll hunt up at least one of the gentlemen who signed them, and with him I'll follow you to Mr. Howarth's.' 'We're not going to Mr. Howarth's, but to my--or rather--well, to what is at present my house in St. James's Square.'