“Do you propose to tell me the truth?” he asked, with a slight cynical emphasis on the last word.

“I do.”

Barrant’s surprise kept him silent for a moment, but when he spoke he was very incisive—­

“In that case it is my duty to warn you—­”

“There is no need to warn me,” Charles quickly interrupted.  “I know.  Any statement I make will be taken down and used against me.  That’s the formula, isn’t it, or something to that effect?  Let us go into the house—­my story will take some time in the telling.”

He made this request as a right rather than a favour, and Barrant found himself turning in at the gate with him.  In silence they walked to the house, and it was Charles Turold who led the way to the sitting-room.

“It was here it began,” he murmured, glancing round the deserted apartment, “and it seems fitting that the truth should be brought to light in the same place.”

“Provided that it is the truth,” commented his companion.

Charles did not reply.  They had been standing face to face, but he now drew a chair to the table and sat down.  Barrant walked to the door and locked it before seating himself beside him.

“You can begin as soon as you like,” he said.

“I think I had better tell you about my own actions, first of all, on that night,” said Charles, after a brief silence.  “It will clear the way for what follows.  I was up here that night—­the night of the murder.”

“I know that much,” was Barrant’s cold comment.

“You suspected it—­you did not know it,” Charles quickly rejoined.

He remained profoundly silent for a moment, as if meditating his words, and then plunged into his tale.

The account of his own visit to Flint House on the night of the murder he related with details withheld from Sisily.  The visit was the outcome of a quarrel between father and son over Robert Turold’s announcement about his wife’s previous marriage.  Charles was shocked by his uncle’s decision to make the story public, and had wandered about the cliffs until dark trying to decide what to do.  Ultimately he returned home and asked his father to use his influence with his brother to keep the secret in the family.  His father called him a fool for suggesting such a thing, declined to offend his brother or blast his own prospects by such damned quixotic nonsense.  On this Charles had announced his intention of seeing his uncle and telling him he would leave England immediately and forever unless the scandal was kept quiet.  That made his father angry, and they quarrelled violently.  Charles cut the quarrel short by flinging out of the house in the rain, to carry out his intention of interviewing his uncle.  He walked across the moors to Flint House.  The front door was open, the downstairs portion of the house in darkness, and his uncle lying upstairs in his study—­dead.

He hurried over all this as of small importance in the deeper significance of Thalassa’s story.  That was to him the great thing—­the wonderful discovery which was to clear Sisily and put everything right.  He believed that the plan which had brought him to Cornwall was working splendidly.  The chance encounter with the detective was really providential—­a speeding up, a saving of valuable time.