. He was
endeavouring to retain a defiant attitude even then.

"You apparently know this man, dad?" Gabrielle exclaimed in surprise.

"Know him!" echoed her father hoarsely. "Know Felix Gerlach! Yes, I have
bitter cause to remember the man who stands there before you accused of
the crime of murder."

Then he paused, and drew a long breath.

"I unmasked him once, as a thief and a swindler, and he swore to be
avenged," said the Baronet in a bitter voice. "It was long ago. He came
to me in London and offered me a concession which he said he had
obtained from the Ottoman Government for the construction of a railroad
from Smyrna to the Bosphorus. The documents appeared to be all right and
in order, and after some negotiations he sold the concession to me and
received ten thousand pounds in cash of the purchase-money in advance. A
week afterwards I discovered that, though the concession had been
granted by the Minister of Public Works at the Sublime Porte, it had
been sold to the Eckmann Group in Vienna, and that the papers I held
were merely copies with forged signatures and stamps. I applied to the
police, this man was arrested in Hamburg, and brought back to London,
where he was tried, and, a previous conviction having been proved
against him, sent to penal servitude for seven years. In the dock at the
Old Bailey he swore to be avenged upon me and upon my family."

"And he seems to have kept his word," Walter remarked.

"When he came out of prison he found me in the zenith of my political
career," Sir Henry went on. "On that well-remembered night of my speech
at the Albert Hall I can only surmise that he went there, heard me, and
probably became fiercely resentful that he had found a man cleverer than
himself. The fact remains that he must have gone in a cab in front of my
carriage to Park Street, alighted before me, and secreted himself within
the portico. It was midnight, and the street was deserted. My carriage
stopped, I got out, and it then drove on to the mews. I was in the act
of opening the door with my latch-key when, by an unknown hand, there
was flung full into my eyes some corrosive fluid which burned terribly,
and caused me excruciating pain. I heard a man's exultant voice cry,
'There! I promised you that, and you have it!' The voice I recognised as
that of the blackguard standing before you. Since that moment," he added
in a blank, hoarse voice, "I have been totally blind!"

"You got me seven years!" c