He had gained his point by sheer insistence, and he knew it.  Bunny knew it also and cursed himself for a weak fool as he moved to comply.  With Saltash’s blade through his heart, he yet could somehow find it possible to endure him.

He went with him in silence, hating the magnetism he found it impossible to resist.  They passed through the shrubberies that skirted the house, and so to the open down.

Then in his sudden fashion, crudely and vehemently, Saltash began his defence.

“It’s not my way,” he said, “to give an answer to any man who questions; but you haven’t stooped to question.  So I tell you the truth.  Sheila saw Toby working as a page at the Casino Hotel at Valrosa.  That right?  I thought so.  It’s the whole matter in a nutshell.  I must have seen her too, but never noticed her till my last night in the place.  Then I found Antonio hammering the poor little beggar out in the garden, and I stopped it.  You’d have done the same.  Afterwards, late that night, I went on board the yacht and found her down in the saloon—­a stowaway.  The yacht had started.  I could have put back.  I didn’t.  You wouldn’t have done either.  She took refuge with me.  I sheltered her.  She came to me as a boy.  I treated her as such.”

“You knew?” flung in Bunny.

Saltash’s grin flashed across his dark features like a meteor through a cloudy sky and was gone.  “I—­suspected, mon ami.  But—­I did not even tell myself.”  That part of him that was French—­a species of volatile sentimentality—­sounded in the words like the echo of a laugh in a minor key.  “I made a valet of her.  I suffered her to clean my boots and brush my clothes.  I kept her in order—­with this—­upon occasion.”

He held up the switch he carried.

“I don’t believe it,” said Bunny bluntly.

Saltash’s shoulders went up.  “You please yourself, mon cher.  I am telling you the truth.  I treated her like a puppy.  I was kind to her, but never extravagantly kind.  But I decided—­eventually I decided—­that it was time to turn home.  No game can last forever.  So we returned, and on our last night at sea we were rammed and sunk.  Naturally that spoilt—­or shall I say somewhat precipitated?—­my plans.  We were saved, the two of us together.  And then was started that scandalous report of the woman on the yacht.”  Again the laughter sounded in his voice.  “You see, mon ami, how small a spark can start a conflagration.  In self-defence I had to invent something, and I invented it quickly.  I said she was Larpent’s daughter.  I wonder if you would have thought of that.  You’d have done it if you had, I’ll wager.”

He turned upon the boy who strode in silence by his side with a gleam of triumph in his eyes, but there was no answering gleam in Bunny’s.  He moved heavily, staring straight before him, his face drawn in hard lines of misery.

“Well,” Saltash said, “that’s all I have done.  You now know the truth, simple and unadorned, as Sheila Melrose in her simplicity does not know it and probably would not comprehend it if she did.”