The darkening alarm which had showed on Miss Girton’s face gave way to a look of perplexity when she heard that her instinctive suspicion was ungrounded. She could be reasonably patient—it was one of her unfeminine characteristics. With a shrug of her heavy shoulders she took a gasper from a glaring yellow packet and lighted it. She smoked like a man, inhaling deeply, and her fingers were stained orange with nicotine.
Patricia puzzled over what excuse she was going to invent. She knew that Miss Girton could be as acute and ruthless in cross-examination as a lawyer. But the Saint’s orders had been to say nothing before the hour had expired, and Patricia thought only of carrying out his orders. Doubtless the reason for them would be given later, together with some sort of elucidation of the mystery, but at present the sole considerations that weighed with her were those of keeping faith with the man whom she had left in such a tight corner and of finding some way to help him out of it if necessary.
“It was like this,” Patricia began at last. “This afternoon I had a note from Bittle asking me to call after dinner without saying anything to anybody. It was most important. I went. After a lot of beating about the bush he told me that he’d had a mortgage on the Manor for years, and that you owed him a lot of money and were asking for more, and that he’d have to foreclose and demand payment of your debts. Was that true?”
“It was,” replied Agatha Girton stonily.
“But why did you have to—— Oh, surely, there can’t have been any need to borrow money? I always understood that Dad left a small fortune.”
Miss Girton shrugged.
“My dear child, I had to draw on that.”
Patricia stared incredulously. Miss Girton, with a face of wood and in a coldly dispassionate voice, added, like an afterthought:
“I’ve been blackmailed for six years.”
“Who by?”