"I think so," he said. "Before I tell you who it is you must prepare yourself for a great shock."
"I know who it is" she said—"Mr. Holymead."
There was no pretence about his astonishment.
"How on earth did you find out?"
She smiled a little at such a revelation of his appreciation of his own cleverness in having probed the mystery.
"I did not find it out," she said. "I had to be told."
"And who told you, Miss Fewbanks?" he asked. "Has he confessed to you?
How long have you known it?"
"I have known it only a few minutes," she said. "Will you tell me how you got on the track and all you have done? I am greatly interested. You have been wonderfully clever to find out. I should never have guessed Mr. Holymead had anything to do with it—I should never have thought it possible. When you have finished I will tell you how I came to know. The story is extremely simple—and sordid."
The fact that the key of the mystery had been in her hands only a few minutes was a solace to Crewe, as it detracted but little from the story he had to tell of patient investigations extending over weeks.
He pieced together the story of the tragedy as he had unravelled it. Hill, he said, had conceived the idea of blackmailing her father after he had discovered the existence of some letters in a secret drawer of Sir Horace's desk. The fact that Sir Horace had kept these letters instead of destroying them as he had destroyed other letters of a somewhat similar kind showed that he was very much infatuated with the lady who wrote them. That lady, as doubtless Miss Fewbanks had guessed, was Mrs. Holymead—a lady with whom Sir Horace had been on very friendly terms before she married Mr. Holymead.