"Panton warned me
that I should have trouble with that woman." He waited a moment, then:
"Did Gifford tell you that they have sent for Panton?" he asked
suddenly. So that, she told herself, was what had really put him on the
track. She nodded, and he added grimly: "They won't get much out of
him."

Then he was going to fight it--fight it to the last?

"You will stand my friend, Blanche," he asked, and slowly she bent her
head.

"Of course you know what this woman Pigchalke wishes to prove?"

He was now looking keenly, breathlessly, into her pale, set face.
"Come," he said, "come, Blanche--don't be so upset! Tell me exactly what
it was that Gifford told you."

But she shook her head. "I--I can't," she murmured.

"Then I will tell you what perhaps he felt ashamed to say to any friend
of mine--that is that Julia Pigchalke suspects me of having done my poor
Milly to death! She went and saw Panton; she did more, she actually
advertised for particulars of my past life. Did he know that?"

He waited, for what seemed a very long time to Blanche, and then in a
voice which, try as he might, was yet full of suppressed anxiety, he
added: "She had got hold somehow of the fact that I once lived at
Chichester."

Blanche looked down, and she counted over, twice, the thirty little bits
of the torn telegram before she answered, in a low, muffled voice:
"It's what happened at Chichester, Lionel, that made them listen to
her."

There was a long moment of tense, of terrible, silence between them.

At last Varick broke the silence, and, speaking in an easy, if excited,
conversational tone, he exclaimed: "That's a bit of bad luck for me! I
have an enemy there--an old fool of a doctor--father of that woman you
met me with years ago."

He walked on a few steps, leaving her standing, and then came back to
her.

More seriously he asked the fateful question: "I take it I am to be
arrested to-morrow?"

He saw by her face that he had guessed truly, and as if speaking to
himself, he said musingly: "That means I have twenty-four hours."

She forced herself to say: "They think you have a good sporting chance
if you stay where you are."

"It never occurred to me to go away!" he said angrily. "I want you
always to remember, Blanche, that I told you, here, and now, that, even
if appearances may come to seem damnably against me, I am an innocent
man."

She answered: "I will always remember that, and always say so."

He said abruptl