seen.

Rochester had been plucked right and left by these harpies. He had
received five thousand pounds for land worth a million from the father,
he had paid eight thousand, or a good part of eight thousand to the
daughter. Fine business that!

I compared Jones, when he was fighting Voles, to a terrier. He had a
good deal of the terrier in his composition, the honesty, the rooting
out instinct, and the fury before vermin. Men run in animal groups, and
if you study animals you will be surprised by nothing so much as the old
race fury that breaks out in the most civilized animal before the old
race quarry or enemy.

For a few seconds, as he paced the floor, Jones was in the mental
condition of a dog in proximity to a hutched badger. Then he began to
think clearly. The obvious fact before him was that Voles, the
Plinlimons and Mulhausen were a gang; the presumptive fact was that the
money paid in blackmail had gone back to Mulhausen, or at least a great
part of it.

Was Mulhausen the spider of the web? Were all the rest his tools and
implements?

Jones had a good deal of instinctive knowledge of women. He did not in
his heart believe that a woman could be so utterly vile as to use love
letters directed to her for the purpose of extracting money from the man
who wrote them. Or rather that, whilst she might use them, it was
improbable that she would invent the method. The whole business had the
stamp of a mind masculine and utterly unscrupulous. Even at first he had
glimpsed this vaguely, when he considered it probable that Lord
Plinlimon had a hand in the affair.

"Now," thought Jones, "if I could bring this home to Mulhausen, I could
squeeze back that coal mine from him. I could sure."

He sat down and lit another cigar to assist him in dealing with this
problem.

It was very easy to say "squeeze Mulhausen," it was a different thing to
do it. He came to this conclusion after a few minutes' earnest
concentration of mind on that problematical person. Hitherto he had been
dealing with small men and wasters. Voles was a plain scoundrel, quite
easily overthrown by direct methods. But Marcus Mulhausen he guessed to
be a big man. The first thing to be done was to verify this supposition.
He rang the bell and sent for Mr. Church.

"Come in," said he, when the latter appeared, "and shut the door. I want
to ask you something."

"Yes, my Lord."

"It's just this. I want you to tell me what you think of Lord Plinlimon,