“I suspect I know the business he came about—­” He was speaking quietly, collectedly, now, and she felt that he was making a great effort to speak calmly and confidently.

“I don’t think, Lionel, that you can know,” she answered at last, in an almost inaudible voice.

“Well, let me tell you what it is that I suspect,” he said.

There was a long pause.  He was looking at her warily, wondering, evidently, as to how far he dared confide in her.  And that look of his made her feel sick and faint.

“I suspect,” he said at last, “that Gifford came to tell you a cock-and-bull story concocted by my wife’s companion, a woman called Julia Pigchalke.”

“Yes, Lionel, you have guessed right.”

It was an unutterable relief that he thus made the way easy for her; a relief—­but she now knew that what Gifford had told her was true.

“He wants me to get everyone away from here to-day,” she went on, in a tone so low that he could scarcely hear her.

“Away from here?  To-day?” he repeated, startled.

“Yes, away before to-morrow midday.”  She moistened her dry lips with her tongue.

“I am the victim of a foul conspiracy!” he exclaimed.  “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.”