“I did not know,” she said slowly, halting between the words. “I haven’t been out very long—barely six months; and I had not heard—anything... I will tell you all I know about the letters, though I don’t quite understand their importance. It’s a case of blackmail, of course—at least, I gathered from Mr Hayhurst that they were being held for blackmail. He had succeeded in getting hold of them. The boy drinks too much, and when he has been drinking he talks. I met him at a friend’s house, and he was talking, boasting of his achievement. He had these most important papers on his person at the time, and was inflated with success, I suppose—and too much wine. I persuaded him to come home with me; and in the carriage he told me so much about the letters that on arriving here I asked him to show me the packet. I intended to induce him to leave it with me until he was sober and more discreet.”
“That was very unwise,” her hearer interrupted. “He would probably have gone away and blabbed further, with the result that this house would have been broken into during the night. It was a risky thing to do.”
“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “But I doubt whether I should have succeeded in persuading him. I think I only roused his suspicions as to the honesty of my intentions. And in any case I should not have been allowed to keep them, for he had evidently been shadowed without knowing it. While I talked with him in this room I fancied I heard a sound on the stoep. The window was open. I walked over to it to look out, but before I could reach it, or realise quite what was happening, a man sprang past me into the room. He struck the poor drunken boy one blow over the head with a stout short stick he carried that stunned him, and I—I was paralysed with terror. I neither moved nor made any sound, until I saw the man coming towards me, and then I suppose I fainted; for I remember nothing more until I came to my senses later and found myself alone.”
“And you never communicated with the police?” he said quickly.
“I sent for the police the following day,” she explained; “but before the inspector arrived I received a message from Tom Hayhurst asking me not to move in the matter.”
She got up and walked with a certain restrained excitement in her movements to the mantel, where she stood, tall and graceful and outwardly composed, with one arm on the high shelf, her face turned away from him.
“There is danger in this undertaking,” she said. “I don’t like it. Why should a man risk his life to do another man—a stranger—a service?”
“You forget the reward,” he said cynically. “The pay is high.”
“The reward would be no compensation to a man for the loss of his life.”
He laughed bitterly.