Stenness had listened to the interchange between the two with an air of a man trying to persuade himself that he is in a dream and that by a violent effort he may be able to shake off his nightmare. At last he seemed to master his feelings.
“It’s all over, is it?” he asked in a choked voice, as though hoping even at the last moment to be reassured by good news.
“It’s all over,” Sir Clinton admitted, gravely.
Stenness seemed to pull himself together.
“Then in that case,” he said, “there seems to be no reason why I shouldn’t make a clean breast of things. Nothing matters much, now; and you may as well get the true story. It’ll make no difference to me.”
Sir Clinton made a vague gesture of assent, but refrained from speaking. After a moment or two, Stenness began.
“This is how it happened. Not so long ago, I was a cub with no near relations to look after me and keep me straight. I’m not whining; I’m simply explaining. I had a few thousands of capital; and naturally a good deal of it got frittered away. I learned something about the world in the process, so perhaps it wasn’t a total loss.”
Sir Clinton noticed that even at this stage Stenness retained his conciseness and stuck to the main facts. The secretary was sparing him useless details; and, as he had said, he was not whining over his losses.
“When I had been at it for a year or two, I had run myself down to a little over five thousand pounds. That’s a good enough nest-egg. But I hadn’t the sense to see it in that light. I wanted a good deal more than three or four hundred a year. So I looked about for some way of increasing my capital.”
A faintly contemptuous expression crossed his face.