"Only once. I was walking through Oxford Circus. I only spoke a few words to him; I have not seen him since."
"Mr. Faversham, did anything important happen that night?"
"Yes, that night—and the next."
"Did that man, Count Romanoff, want you to do something which—which was wrong? Forgive me for asking, won't you? But I have felt ever since that it was so."
"Yes." He said the word slowly, doubtfully. At that moment the old house burst upon his view, and he longed with a great longing to possess it. He felt hard and bitter that a man like Tony Riggleton should first have made it a scene of obscene debauchery and then have left it. It seemed like sacrilege that such a man should be associated with it. At that moment, too, it seemed such a little thing that Romanoff had asked him to do.
"If I had done what he asked me, I might have been the owner of Wendover Park now," he added.
"But how could that be, if that man Riggleton was the true heir?" she asked.
"At that time there seemed—doubt. He made me feel that Riggleton had no right to be there, and if I had promised the Count something, I might have kept it."
"And that something was wrong?"
"Yes, it was wrong. Of course I am speaking to you in absolute confidence," he added. "When you came you made me see things as they really were."