esitate to disclose to me all you know. Your
late brother honoured me with his confidence for nearly thirty years." Mr.
Brimsdown coughed discreetly.

His tone invited confidences which Mrs. Pendleton, in her perplexity of
spirit, was only too anxious to impart to a sympathetic ear. Mr.
Brimsdown, sitting stiffly upright, his eyes fixed on a portrait of
Royalty glimmering inanely down at them through a dirty glass frame on the
opposite wall, listened with unmoved front. Yet the story had its
surprises, even for him. Not the least of them was the fact that Mrs.
Pendleton's description of her niece tallied with the appearance of the
girl whose identity he had tried to recall at Paddington. He was chagrined
to think he had failed to recognize his late client's daughter, but he
recalled that it was ten years since he had seen Sisily, who was then a
dark-eyed little girl. At Norfolk. Oh, yes! he remembered her readily
enough now, playing innocently about some forgotten tombstones in a
deserted graveyard on a wild grey coast, while her father wrested savagely
with the dead for his heritage. Strange that he should have met her again
at the moment of her flight, when he was setting out for Cornwall in
response to her dead father's letter! Life had such ironical mischances.

He said nothing of this chance encounter, or of Robert Turold's letter, to
the dead man's sister who was now pouring out her fears and suspicions to
him. He was a receptacle into which confidences might be emptied, but he
gave nothing in return. Mrs. Pendleton did not need that. Her state of
mind compelled her to speak, and her impulsiveness hurried her along on
the high tide of a flood of words. The story she had to tell oppressed her
listener with the sense of some great unknown horror. It was like trying
to see a dark place by lightning. The flashes of her revelations revealed
a distorted surface, but not the hidden depths. Mrs. Pendleton's agitated
mind, doubling in and out a maze of conjectures like a distracted hare,
turned again and again to the question of Sisily's complicity in her
father's death.

"I can hardly believe it even now," she said with a shudder. "Such a sweet
pretty girl! And yet--there was something strange in her manner. I
remarked it to Joseph--my husband--before this happened." She pressed her
handkerchief to her eyes.

The lawyer, with a sideways glance at the Royal portrait opposite, which
seemed in the act of smiling blandly a