erself down
and buried her face on her bare arms.

Knight followed, to stand staring in stunned silence at the bowed
head and shaking shoulders. He could hear the ticking of a small,
nervous-sounding clock on the mantelpiece. It was like the beating
of a heart that must soon break. At last, when the ticking had gone
on unbearably long, he spoke.

"Anita, you called me a cheat," he said. "I suppose you mean that I
cheated you by playing the hero that night at the Savoy, and stealing
your sympathy and help under false pretenses; that I've been steadily
cheating you and your friends every day since. That's true, in a way--or
it was at first. But lately it's not been the same sort of cheating. It
began to be the real thing with me. I mean I felt it in me to be the
real thing. As for the other name you gave me--thief--I'm not exactly
that--not a thief who steals with his own hands, though I dare say I'm
as bad.

"If I haven't stolen, I've shown others the most artistic way to steal.
I've shown men and women how to make stealing a fine art, and I've been
in with them in the game. Indeed, it was my game. Madalena de Santiago,
and the two men you knew first as the 'watchers,' then as Torrance and
Morello, now as Charrington and Char, have been no more than the pawns I
used, or rather they've been my cat's paws. There's only one other man at
the head of the show besides me, and that is one whose name I can't give
away even to you.

"But he's a great man, a kind of financial Napoleon--a great artist, too.
He doesn't call himself a thief. He's honoured by society in Europe and
America; yet what I've done in comparison to what he's done is like a
brook to the size of the ocean. He has a picture gallery and a private
museum which are famous; but there's another gallery of pictures and
another museum which nobody except himself has ever seen. His real life,
his real joy, are in them. Most of the masterpieces and treasures of this
world which have disappeared are safe in that hidden place, which I've
helped to fill.

"That man has no regrets. He revels in what he calls his 'secret
orchard.' He thinks I ought to be proud of what I've done for him; and so
I was once. I came here and brought the other people over to England to
work for him.

"Not that that fact will whitewash me in your eyes; not that I wasn't
working for myself, too, and not that I'm trying to make more excuses by
explaining this. But I'd like you to understand,