"Yet none of the guilt is yours!"
The tone cut like a knife. Lowndes had been hanging his head, but his spectacles flashed as he raised it now.
"I never said that!" cried he. "God knows I was guilty enough after the event; and God knows, also, that I did what I could to make it up to you and yours in every other way later on. You may smile in my face—I deserve it—but what would you have gained if I had blown the gaff? Nothing at all; whereas I should have been bowled out in getting your father abroad with the very money I'd raised to save the ship; and that alone would have been the very devil for me. No Crofter Fisheries! Very likely Wormwood Scrubs instead! I couldn't face it; so I held my tongue, and I've been paying for it to this ruffian ever since."
"Paying for it!" echoed Scrafton. "Paying me to hold my tongue; that's what he means!"
"It is true enough," said Lowndes quietly, in answer to a look from Harry.
"He admits it!" cried Scrafton, snuffing horribly in his exultation; "he might just as well admit the whole thing. Who but a guilty man pays another to hold his tongue?"
"I have confessed the full extent of my guilt," said Lowndes, in the same quiet voice.
"Then why were you such a blockhead as to put yourself at my mercy to-night?" roared the other, his bloodshot eyes breaking into a sudden blaze of fury.
Lowndes stood a little without replying; and Harry Ringrose, still wavering between the two men, and as yet distrusting and condemning them equally in his heart, saw all at once a twinkle in the spectacled eyes which weighed more with him than words. A twitch of the sharp nose completed a characteristic look which Harry could neither forget nor misunderstand; it was not that of the losing side; and now, for the first time, the lad could believe it was a real detective, and not a third accomplice, who was waiting in the street below.
"Do you think I am the man to put myself at your mercy?" asked Lowndes at length, and with increased serenity.