"Yes. Her father had given her most of them before his business failure. He failed last fall, I forgot to mention."
"Now," Bristow said persuasively, "about this blackmailing proposition. What was—what is your idea about that?"
Withers produced and lit a cigarette, handling it with quivering fingers.
"Somebody, some man, had a hold of some sort on her. Whenever he needed money, had to have money, he got it from her. That is, he did this whenever he could find her away from home. So far as I know, he never tried to operate in Atlanta."
"What do you think this hold was?"
"Well," Withers began, and paused.
"Your theories are perfectly safe with us," Bristow reassured him.
"I thought, naturally, that it had something to do with her life previous to the time I met her."
"How?"
"I didn't know. That's what worried me." All of a sudden, his hearers got a clear idea of what the man had suffered. It was plainly to be detected in his voice. "It might have been a harmless love affair, a flirtation, with letters involved, letters which she thought would distress me if I ever saw them."