“We had an understanding.”

“That’s good. It saved us. We are no longer in the toils of the secret-keeper. Now no one can say that Mother Flintstone was our near kin.”

The tall, regal-looking girl seemed almost beside herself with joy.

She would have embraced Claude had not his coldness repulsed her, and in a few moments she withdrew.

“I’ll take it now,” said Claude, addressing his parent.

“Oh, yes. You’ll place it to your account, I suppose?”

“Of course.”

Perry Lamont filled out a check for two hundred thousand dollars, and pushed it across the desk to his son.

Claude looked at it a moment, and then transferred it to his pocket.

It was the cost of a secret; it was also blood money, and the time was near at hand when that deed was to return to plague the doers.