And he sat down, and Hugo sat down.

‘When is it to be?’ Ravengar questioned.

‘In a few minutes,’ said Hugo impassively, feeding his mortal resentment on the memory of those hours when he himself had waited for death in the vault.

’Then I shall have time to ask you how you came to know that Camilla Payne, or rather Camilla Tudor, is alive.’

‘She is not alive,’ Hugo explained.  ’The suggestion contained in my decoy letter was a pure invention in order to entice you.  As you tempted me into the vault, so I tempted you here on your way to the vault.’

‘But she is alive all the same!’ Ravengar persisted.  ’It is the fact that she is not dead that makes me less unwilling to die, for a word from her might send me to a death more shameful than the one you have so kindly arranged for me.’

Hugo in that instant admired Ravengar, and he replied quite gently: 

’You are mistaken.  Where can you have got the idea that she is not dead?  She is dead.  I myself—­I myself screwed her up in her coffin.’

The words sounded horrible.

‘Then you were in the plot!’ Ravengar cried.

‘What plot?’

’The plot to persuade me falsely that she is dead.  Bah!  I know more than you think.  I know, for example, that her body is not in the coffin in Brompton Cemetery.  And I am almost sure that I know where she is hiding.  I should have known beyond doubt before to-morrow morning.  However, what does it matter now?’

‘Not in the coffin?’ Hugo whispered, as if to himself.  His whole frame trembled, shook, and his heart, leaping, defied his intellect.

CHAPTER XVI

BURGLARS

When at eleven o’clock that same winter night Hugo stood hesitating, with certain tools and a hooded electric lamp in his hand, on the balcony in front of the drawing-room window of Francis Tudor’s sealed flat, he thought what a strange, illogical, and capricious thing is the human heart.

He knew that Camilla was dead.  He had had the very best and most convincing evidence of the fact.  He knew that Ravengar’s suspicions were without foundation, utterly wrong-headed; and yet those statements of his enemy had unsettled him.  They had not unsettled the belief of his intelligence, but they had unsettled his soul’s peace.  And that curiosity to learn the whole truth about the history of the relations between Francis Tudor and Camilla, that curiosity which had slumbered for months, and which had been so suddenly awakened by Ravengar’s lure of the morning, was now urged into a violent activity.