been
through? What is this plot? A plot--in my building--and against you!
Tell me everything--everything! I insist.'

'Shall you believe all that I say?' she ventured.

'Yes,' he said, 'all.'

He saw with intense joy that he was going to be friendly with her. It
seemed too good to be true.

CHAPTER V

A STORY AND A DISAPPEARANCE

'Perhaps I ought to begin by informing you,' said Camilla Payne, 'that I
have known Mr. Francis Tudor for about two years. Always he has been
very nice to me. Once he asked me to marry him--quite suddenly--it was a
year ago. I refused because I didn't care for him. I then saw nothing of
him for some time. But after I entered your service here, he came across
me again by accident. I did not know until lately that he had one of
your flats. He was very careful, very polite, timid, cautious--but very
obstinate, too. He invited me to call on him at his rooms, and to bring
any friends I liked. Of course, it was a stupidity on his part, but,
then, what else could he do? A man who wants to cultivate relations with
a homeless shopgirl is rather awkwardly fixed.'

'I wish to Heaven you would not talk like that, Miss Payne!' said Hugo,
interrupting her impatiently.

'I am merely telling you these things so that you may understand my
position,' Camilla coldly replied. 'Do you imagine that I am amusing
myself?'

'Go on, go on, I beg,' he urged, with a gesture of apology.

'Naturally, I declined the invitation. Then next I received a letter
from him, in which he said that unless I called on him, or agreed to
meet him in some place where we could talk privately and at length, he
should kill himself within a week. And he added that death was perhaps
less to him than I imagined. I believed that letter. There was something
about it that touched me.'

'And so you decided to yield?'

'I did yield. I felt that if I was to trust him at all, I might as well
trust him fully, and I called at his flat this afternoon alone. He was
evidently astonished to see me at that hour, so I explained to him that
you had closed early for some reason or other.'

'Exactly,' said Hugo.

He insisted on giving me tea. I was treated, in fact, like a princess;
but during tea he said nothing to me that might not have been said
before a roomful of people. After tea he left me for a few moments, in
order, as he said, to give some orders to his servants. Up till then he
had been extremely agitated, and when he return