Pamela nodded understandingly.
"All the same," she remarked, "I am not at all sure that was the case with Captain Graham's invention. There were rumours for days before that something wonderful was happening on Salisbury Plain. They had to cover up whole acres of ground after his last experiments, and a man who was down there told me that it seemed just as though the life had been sucked out of it."
"Where did you collect all this information?" her visitor inquired.
She shrugged her shoulders.
"One hears everything in London."
Lutchester was sitting with his finger-tips pressed together. For a moment his attention seemed fixed upon them.
"There are things," he said, "which one hears, too, in the far corners of the world—on the Atlantic, for instance."
"You have had some news?" she interrupted.
"It is really a private piece of information," he told her, "and it won't be in the papers—not the way the thing happened, anyway—but I don't suppose there's any harm in telling you, as we were both more or less mixed up in the affair. Graham was shot the next day, on his way up to Northumberland."
"Shot?" she exclaimed incredulously.