‘Sit down,’ he said in a quiet, familiar voice.  ’Don’t bother about thanking me.  Just tell me all about the history of your relations with Ravengar.’  And to himself he said:  ’She shall talk to me, and I will listen, and we shall begin to be intimate.  This is the greatest happiness I can have.  Hang the future!  I will give way to my mood.  Darcy said she didn’t want to leave Paris, but she has left it.  That’s something.’

‘I will do anything you want,’ she answered almost gaily; and she sat down again.

‘I doubt it,’ he smiled.  ‘However—­’

The sense of intimacy, of nearness, gave him acute pleasure, as at their first interview months ago.

‘I would like to tell you,’ she began; ’and there is no harm now.  Where shall I start?  Well’—­she became suddenly grave—­’Mr. Ravengar used to pass my father’s shop in the Edgware Road.  He came in to buy things.  It was a milliner’s shop, and so he could buy nothing but bonnets and hats.  He bought bonnets and hats.  I often served him.  He gave my father some very good hints about shares, but my father never took them.  When my parents both died, Mr. Ravengar was extremely sympathetic, and offered me a situation in his office.  I took it.  I became his secretary.  He was always very polite and considerate to me, except sometimes when he got angry with everybody, including me.  He couldn’t help being rude then.  He had an old clerk named Powitt, who sat in the outer office, and seemed to do nothing.  Powitt had just brains enough to gamble, and he gambled in the shares of Mr. Ravengar’s companies.  I know he lost money, because he used to confide in me and grumble at Mr. Ravengar for not giving him proper tips.  Mr. Ravengar simply sneered at him—­he was very hard.  Powitt had a younger brother, who was engaged in another City office, and this younger brother also gambled in Ravengar shares, and also lost.  The two brothers gambled more and more, and old Powitt once told me that Mr. Ravengar misled them sometimes from sheer—­what shall I call it?’

‘Devilry,’ Hugo suggested.  ’I can believe it.  That would be his idea of a good joke.’

’By-and-by I learnt that they were in serious difficulties.  Young Powitt was married, but his wife left him—­I believe he had taken to drink.  There was a glass partition between my room and Mr. Ravengar’s—­ground glass at the bottom, clear glass at the top.  One night, after hours, I went back to the office for an umbrella which I had forgotten, and I found young Powitt trying to open the petty-cash-box in my room.  He had not succeeded, and I just told him to go, and that I should forget I had seen him there.  He kissed my hand.  And just then the outer door of the office opened, and someone entered.  I turned off the light in my room.  Young Powitt crouched down.  It was Mr. Ravengar.  He went to his own room.  I jumped on a chair, and looked through the glass screen.  Old Powitt was hanging by the neck from the brass curtain-rod in Mr. Ravengar’s room.  While young Powitt was trying to get out of their difficulties by thieving, old Powitt had taken a shorter way.  Mr. Ravengar looked at the body swinging there, and I heard him say, “Ah!” Like that!’