‘Nine times out of ten, proverbs are true,’ he said in a tone of amusement.

Mr. Van Torp’s hard face expressed no triumph when Margaret stood beside him, ready to walk.  She had yielded, as he had been sure she would; he turned from the other passengers to go round to the weather side of the ship, and she went with him submissively.  Just at the point where the wind and the fine spray would have met them if they had gone on, he stopped in the lee of a big ventilator.  There was no one in sight of them now.

‘Excuse me for making you get up,’ he said.  ’I wanted to see you alone for a moment.’

Margaret said nothing in answer to this apology, and she met his fixed eyes coldly.

‘You were with Miss Bamberger when she died,’ he said.

Margaret bent her head gravely in assent.  His face was as expressionless as a stone.

‘I thought she might have mentioned me before she died,’ he said slowly.

‘Yes,’ Margaret answered after a moment’s pause; ‘she did.’

‘What did she say?’

’She told me that it was a secret, but that I was to tell you what she said, if I thought it best.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’

It was impossible to guess whether he was controlling any emotion or not; but if the men with whom he had done business where large sums were involved had seen him now and had heard his voice, they would have recognised the tone and the expression.

‘She said, “he did it,"’ Margaret answered slowly, after a moment’s thought.

‘Was that all she said?’

’That was all.  A moment later she was dead.  Before she said it, she told me it was a secret, and she made me promise solemnly never to tell any one but you.’

‘It’s not much of a secret, is it?’ As he spoke, Mr. Van Torp turned his eyes from Margaret’s at last and looked at the grey sea beyond the ventilator.

‘Such as it is, I have told it to you because she wished me to,’ answered Margaret.  ’But I shall never tell any one else.  It will be all the easier to be silent, as I have not the least idea what she meant.’

‘She meant our engagement,’ said Mr. Van Torp in a matter-of-fact tone.  ’We had broken it off that afternoon.  She meant that it was I who did it, and so it was.  Perhaps she did not like to think that when she was dead people might call her heartless and say she had thrown me over; and no one would ever know the truth except me, unless I chose to tell—­me and her father.’

‘Then you were not to be married after all!’ Margaret showed her surprise.

’No.  I had broken it off.  We were going to let it be known the next day.’

‘On the very eve of the wedding!’

‘Yes.’  Mr. Van Torp fixed his eyes on Margaret’s again.  ’On the very eve of the wedding,’ he said, repeating her words.

He spoke very slowly and without emphasis, but with the greatest possible distinctness.  Margaret had once been taken to see a motor-car manufactory and she remembered a machine that clipped bits off the end of an iron bar, inch by inch, smoothly and deliberately.  Mr. Van Torp’s lips made her think of that; they seemed to cut the hard words one by one, in lengths.