urriedly--"if you heard, of
what happened to me in London just before my father died? I had an
accident. It seemed a slight one at the time. I fell down on the stairs
one evening that he was worse when I ran down quickly to fetch my
husband, and I had concussion of the brain afterwards and was
unconscious for forty-eight hours. And since, I have not been able to
remember anything of what happened during those days."

Pateley made a sort of sympathetic sound and gesture.

"But," Rachel said, "I have heard to-day--not until to-day--of something
that happened during that time, something terrible. I am going to tell
it to you, in the greatest confidence. You will see when I tell you
that it matters very, very much. First of all,--this I remember--on the
day my father began to be worse, Lord Stamfordham brought my husband
some papers to copy for him in which was the Agreement with Germany, and
told him no one was to know about them, and my husband told no one, and
sent them back, when they were done, to Stamfordham, in a sealed
packet."

Pateley, as he listened, sat absolutely impenetrable, with his eyes
fixed on the ground.

"But somebody got hold of them," she went on--"somebody must have stolen
them, because they were published the next morning in the paper, in the
_Arbiter_." And as the words left her lips she suddenly realised that
the man in front of her was the one of all others in the world who must
know what had happened. The _Arbiter_ was embodied in Pateley, it was
Pateley: that, everybody knew, everybody repeated. Pateley would, he
must, be able to tell her.

"Oh," she cried, "the _Arbiter_ is your paper!"

"Yes," said Pateley, looking at her.

"Then," she said, "you know--you must know."

"Know what?" he said calmly.

"You must know," she said, "who it was told the _Arbiter_ what was in
those papers."

Pateley sat silent a moment. Then he said--

"It can and does happen occasionally that things are brought to the
_Arbiter_ of which I don't know the origin, in fact of which the origin
is purposely kept a secret."

She waited for him to add something to this sentence, to add a _but_ to
it, but he remained silent. Being unversed in diplomatic evasions, she
accepted his words as a disclaimer.

"But still," she said, "even if you don't know this you could find it
out. It matters terribly. I don't want to say to any one else, it is not
a thing to be told, how horribly it matters, but I must tell _you_