"Then I got your letter, and that letter was just enough to stir me up and to make me wild, to put me into a sort of frenzy. So at last I said to myself: 'There's nothing like bearding the lion in his den,' and one day, quite early in the morning, I called at the house in Hanbury Square. I asked to see Lady Helen Dalrymple, and as I stood at the door a boy came up with a telegram. The telegram was taken in, and I was also admitted, for I gave the sort of message that would cause a woman of her description to see me. She was in her boudoir, and she came forward in a frenzy of distraction and grief, and said: 'What do you want? Go away! I am in dreadful trouble; I won't see you--it's like your impertinence to come here!' "'I won't keep you long,' I said. 'I want to get at once from you Colonel Gideon Dalrymple's private address, for I have something of the utmost importance to talk over with him.' "'What?' she screamed. 'You can't see him--you can't possibly see him. He's very ill. I've just had a telegram from a nursing home where he is staying. I am on my way to see him myself. My poor, poor brother!' "'Oh, then, if he is ill, of course he'll confess,' I said. 'I may as well go with you. He has got to confess, sooner or later, and the sooner he does it the better.'" "Vernon! You said _that_ to her?" "Yes, Heather; I said all that." "Oh, you had courage. But what did you mean?" "I knew quite well what I meant. I had gathered a few facts together from those papers, and I meant to put the screw on when I saw the victim. Was not I working for home, and love, and wife? Was I likely to hesitate? Was I not working for a good man's honour? What else is a soldier worth if he can't make the best of such a job as I had set myself? "Well, the long and short of it was this, Heather. That woman got as meek as a mouse. I put the screw on her right away, and she was so frightened she hardly knew what to do; so terrified was she that in less than ten minutes I could do anything with her, and in a quarter of an hour she and I were going in her motor-car to the home where the Honourable Gideon was lying at the point of death, owing to a fresh attack of his old enemy, D.T. We both saw him together, and the moment I looked at his face I said to myself: 'You're the boy; you have got the ugly sort of face that would be capable of doing that sort of low-down, mean thing.'