“However, I have now confirmatory evidence for my theory of the matter—­evidence which has never been produced—­and which I tell you now simply because the happiness of her child—­and of your son—­is at stake.”

Lady Lucy moved a little.  The color returned to her cheeks.  Sir James, however, gave her no time to interrupt.  He stood before her, smiting one hand against another, to emphasize his words, as he continued: 

“Francis Wing lived for some eighteen years after Mrs. Sparling’s death.  Then, just as the police were at last on his track as the avengers of a long series of frauds, he died at Antwerp in extreme poverty and degradation.  The day before he died he dictated a letter to me, which reached me, through a priest, twenty-four hours after his death.  For his son’s sake, he invited me to regard it as confidential.  If Mrs. Sparling had been alive I should, of course, have taken no notice of the request.  But she had been dead for eighteen years; I had lost sight completely of Sparling and the child, and, curiously enough, I knew something of Wing’s son.  He was about ten years old at the death of his mother, and was then rescued from his father by the Wing kindred and decently brought up.  At the time the letter reached me he was a promising young man of eight-and-twenty, he had just been called to the Bar, and he was in the chambers of a friend of mine.  By publishing Wing’s confession I could do no good to the dead, and I might harm the living.  So I held my tongue.  Whether, now, I should still hold it is, no doubt, a question.

“However, to go back to the statement.  Wing declared to me in this letter that Juliet Sparling’s relation to him had been absolutely innocent, that he had persecuted her with his suit, and she had never given him a friendly word, except out of fear.  On the fatal evening he had driven her out of her mind, he said, by his behavior in the garden; she was not answerable for her actions; and his evidence at the trial was merely dictated either by the desire to make his own case look less black or by the fiendish wish to punish Juliet Sparling for her loathing of him.

“But he confessed something else!—­more important still.  I must go back a little.  You will remember my version of the dagger incident?  I represented Mrs. Sparling as finding the dagger on the wall as she was pushed or dragged up against the panelling by her antagonist—­as it were, under her hand.  Wing swore at the trial that the dagger was not there, and had never been there.  The house belonged to an old traveller and sportsman who had brought home arms of different sorts from all parts of the world.  The house was full of them.  There were two collections of them on the wall of the dining-room, one in the hall, and one or two in the gallery.  Wing declared that the dagger used was taken by Juliet Sparling from the hall trophy, and must have been carried up-stairs with a deliberate purpose of murder.  According to him, their quarrel