"It wasn't sent," he said in reply. "I never meant to send it."
I turned on him fiercely, and spluttered out his own words: "Never meant to send it? What do you mean?"
"You don't want to murder me," he muttered, putting the table between us, and grinning weakly. "I tell you I never meant to send it—I never had the money to pay it."
I sat down and looked at him; the horror of the other business was falling away from me in the contemplation of this treachery. "I want you to explain," I said patiently.
"You young fool!" he exclaimed with sudden violence, as he saw how tame and quiet I was, "don't you understand that I meant this to happen from the first? Don't you understand what every one is going to say when they find him, and when they find what is in his pockets? You owed him money; you had been gambling with him, and had nothing to pay him with. You quarrelled with him at Hammerstone Market; you were heard to threaten to kill him. You follow him to his rooms; he demands the money; there is a quarrel, and the stronger and the younger man wins. Oh, you fool!"
"Why have you done it?" I asked him, still very quietly.
He paced about the room for a minute or two, and then came back to me. I knew that there was time enough, and so I waited; I did not see daylight yet.
"I have been in Hockley's clutches for years," said Jervis Fanshawe, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone; "he has bled me steadily for a long time past. I began gambling with him, and I lost; tried to retrieve my losses, and lost more. Every penny I ever had has gone to him—and other money besides."
"What other money? Mine?"
He nodded slowly. "Every bit of it, and more besides that. I'm deeply involved with the firm; that was my chief reason for trying to get hold of that girl, for with her I could have stopped all tongues wagging, and could have paid Hockley off. It was when I saw you, hot-headed and hot-blooded, and only too eager to quarrel with the man, that the idea came into my mind that I might use you. That—and the story I heard."