Garratt Skinner covered his mouth with his hand.  It seemed to Sylvia that he smiled.  A suspicion flashed across her mind, in spite of herself.  Was he merely testing her to see whether she would speak the truth or not?  Did he know that she had come down the stairs in the early morning?  She thrust the suspicion aside, remembering the self-reproach which suspicion had already caused her at this very luncheon table.  If it were true that her father knew, why then Barstow or Parminter must have told him this very morning.  And if he had seen either of them this morning, all his talk to her in this cool and quiet place was a carefully prepared hypocrisy.  No, she would not believe that.

“You saw them?” he exclaimed.  “Tell me how.”

She told him the whole story, how she had come down the staircase, what she had seen, as she leaned over the balustrade, and how Parminter had turned.

“Do you think he saw you?” asked her father.

Sylvia looked at him closely.  But he seemed really anxious to know.

“I think he saw something,” she answered.  “Whether he knew that it was I whom he saw, I can’t tell.”

Garratt Skinner sat for a little while smoking his cigar in short, angry puffs.

“I wouldn’t have had that happen for worlds,” he said, with a frown.  “I have no doubt whatever that the slips of paper on which poor Hine was trying to write were I.O.U’s.  Heaven knows what he lost last night.”

“I know,” returned Sylvia.  “He lost L480 last night.”

“Impossible,” cried Garratt Skinner, with so much violence that the people lunching at the tables near-by looked up at the couple with surprise.  “Oh, no!  I’ll not believe it, Sylvia.”  And as he lowered his voice, he seemed to be making an appeal to her to go back upon her words, so distressed was he at the thought that Wallie Hine should be jockeyed out of so much money at his house.

“Four hundred and eighty pounds,” Sylvia repeated.

Garratt Skinner caught at a comforting thought.

“Well, it’s only in I.O.U’s.  That’s one thing.  I can stop the redemption of them.  You see, he has been robbed—­that’s the plain English of it—­robbed.”

“Mr. Hine was not writing an I.O.U.  He was writing a check, and Mr. Parminter was guiding his hand as he wrote the signature.”

Garratt Skinner fell back in his chair.  He looked about him with a dazed air, as though he expected the world falling to pieces around him.

“Why, that’s next door to forgery!” he whispered, in a voice of horror.  “Guiding the hand of a man too drunk to write!  I knew Archie Parminter was pretty bad, but I never thought that he would sink to that.  I am not sure that he could not be laid by the heels for forgery.”  And then he recovered a little from the shock.  “But you can’t be sure, Sylvia!  This is guesswork of yours—­yes, guesswork.”

“It’s not,” she answered.  “I told you that the floor was littered with slips of the paper on which Mr. Hine had been trying to write.”