But she shook her head. "I—I can't," she murmured.
"Then I will tell you what perhaps he felt ashamed to say to any friend of mine—that is that Julia Pigchalke suspects me of having done my poor Milly to death! She went and saw Panton; she did more, she actually advertised for particulars of my past life. Did he know that?"
He waited, for what seemed a very long time to Blanche, and then in a voice which, try as he might, was yet full of suppressed anxiety, he added: "She had got hold somehow of the fact that I once lived at Chichester."
Blanche looked down, and she counted over, twice, the thirty little bits of the torn telegram before she answered, in a low, muffled voice: "It's what happened at Chichester, Lionel, that made them listen to her."
There was a long moment of tense, of terrible, silence between them.
At last Varick broke the silence, and, speaking in an easy, if excited, conversational tone, he exclaimed: "That's a bit of bad luck for me! I have an enemy there—an old fool of a doctor—father of that woman you met me with years ago."
He walked on a few steps, leaving her standing, and then came back to her.
More seriously he asked the fateful question: "I take it I am to be arrested to-morrow?"
He saw by her face that he had guessed truly, and as if speaking to himself, he said musingly: "That means I have twenty-four hours."
She forced herself to say: "They think you have a good sporting chance if you stay where you are."