dly allow me some conversation with you? It was
you--practically--who introduced Louis to that man. You meant well to
Louis, and Mr. Wharton has been your friend. We therefore feel that we
owe you some explanation. For that paragraph"--he pointed to the
paper--"is, substantially--Louis's doing, and mine."

"_Yours?_" she said mechanically. "But Louis has been going on working
for the paper--I persuaded him."

"I know. It was not we who actually discovered the thing. But we set a
friend to work. Louis has had his suspicions all along. And at last--by
the merest chance--we got the facts."

Then he told the story, staring at her the while with his sparkling
eyes, his thin invalid's fingers fidgeting with his hat. If there was in
truth any idea in his mind that the relations between his companion and
Harry Wharton were more than those of friendship, it did not avail to
make him spare her in the least. He was absorbed in vindictive feeling,
which applied to her also. He might _say_ for form's sake that she had
meant well; but in fact he regarded her at this moment as a sort of
odious Canidia whose one function had been to lure Louis to misfortune.
Cut off himself, by half a score of peculiarities, physical and other,
from love, pleasure, and power, Anthony Craven's whole affections and
ambitions had for years centred in his brother. And now Louis was not
only violently thrown out of employment, but compromised by the
connection with the _Clarion_; was, moreover, saddled with a wife--and
in debt.

So that his explanation was given with all the edge he could put upon
it. Let her stop him, if she pleased!--but she did not stop him.

The facts were these:

Louis had, indeed, been persuaded by Marcella, for the sake of his wife
and bread and butter, to go on working for the _Clarion_, as a reviewer.
But his mind was all the time feverishly occupied with the apostasy of
the paper and its causes. Remembering Wharton's sayings and letters
throughout the struggle, he grew less and less able to explain the
incident by the reasons Wharton had himself supplied, and more and more
convinced that there was some mystery behind.

He and Anthony talked the matter over perpetually. One evening Anthony
brought home from a meeting of the Venturists that George Denny, the son
of one of the principal employers in the Damesley trade, whose name he
had mentioned once before in Marcella's ears. Denny was by this time the
candidate for a Labou