ught she was being
imposed upon financially. In fact, I was sure of it. I'm sure of it now."

"You mean blackmail?" Bristow narrowed down the inquiry.

"Just that. And I'll tell you about it." He rasped his dry lips again.
"This sort of thing, this blackmail, had happened to her twice before
this. Once it was when she was at Atlantic City for a month with her
sister, Miss Maria Fulton.

"That was a year after our marriage. Then, two years later--just about a
year ago now--when she was in Washington visiting her father and sister.
Both those times things happened as they had begun to happen here, in
fact as they've been happening here for the past two months."

"Well," Bristow urged him on, "what happened?"

"She got away with too much money, more money than she could possibly
have used for herself in any legitimate way. First, she got her father to
give her all she could get out of him. Her second step would be to write
to me for all I could spare, making flimsy excuses for her need of it.

"Her third resource was to pawn all her jewels. She pawned them on these
first two occasions I've described. I say she pawned them, but I never
had definite proof of it. However, I was sure of it. I don't know that
she had come to this in Furmville. If she hadn't she would have."

"What were Mrs. Withers' jewels worth?"

"Originally, I should say, they cost about fifteen thousand dollars. She
had no difficulty, I suppose, in raising six or seven thousand dollars on
them--even more than that."

"They were worth so much as all that?"

"Yes. Her father had given her most of them before his business failure.
He failed last fall, I forgot to mention."

"Now," Bristow said persuasively, "about this blackmailing proposition.
What was--what is your idea about that?"

Withers produced and lit a cigarette, handling it with quivering fingers.

"Somebody, some man, had a hold of some sort on her. Whenever he needed
money, had to have money, he got it from her. That is, he did this
whenever he could find her away from home. So far as I know, he never
tried to operate in Atlanta."

"What do you think this hold was?"

"Well," Withers began, and paused.

"Your theories are perfectly safe with us," Bristow reassured him.

"I thought, naturally, that it had something to do with her life previous
to the time I met her."

"How?"

"I didn't know. That's what worried me." All of a sudden, his hearers got
a clear idea of what the man