“Not such a great pity,” answered Martin, and taking a letter from his pocket he threw it down upon the table, with the ghost of a smile upon his face.  “What do you think I have been doing during the last two years?” he asked drily.

Harry pounced upon the letter and his first glance dispelled his illusion—­nay, proved to him that he had never had faith in it.  For he saw, without surprise, the broad strokes and the straight up-and-down letters familiar to him of old.  Stella had always written rather like a man, a man without character.  He had made a joke of it to her in the time before the little jokes aimed by the one at the other had begun to rasp.

“Yes, she wrote the letter and signed it with Sir Chichester’s name.”

Millie Splay reached out for the letter.

“Stella took a big risk,” she said.  “I don’t understand it.  She must have foreseen that Chichester’s hand was likely to be familiar in the office.”

“No, Millie,” said Sir Chichester suddenly, and he spurred his memory.  “Of course!  Of course!  Stella helped me with the telephone one day this week in the library there.  I told her that I was new to the Harpoon.”  He suddenly beat upon the table with his fist.  “But why should she write the letter at all?  Why should she want her death here, under these strange conditions, announced to the world?  A little cruel I call it—­yes, Millie, a little cruel.”

“Stella wasn’t cruel,” said Lady Splay.

“She wasn’t,” Hillyard agreed.  “I know why she wrote that.  She wrote it to strengthen her hand and will at the last moment.  The message was sent, the announcement of her death would be published in the morning, was already in print.  Just that knowledge would serve as the final compulsion to do what she wished to do.  She wrote lest her courage and nerve should at the last moment fail her, as to my knowledge they had failed her before.”

“Before!” cried Millie.  “She had tried before!  Oh, poor woman!”

“Yes,” said Hillyard, and he told them all of the vague but very real fear which had once driven him into Surrey in chase of her; of her bedroom with the bed unslept in and the lights still burning in the blaze of a summer morning; of herself sitting all night at her writing-table, making dashes and figures upon the notepaper and unable to steel herself to the last dreadful act.

Martin Hillyard gave no reason for her misery upon that occasion, nor did any one think to inquire.  He just told the story from his heart, and therefore with a great simplicity of words.  There was not one of those who heard him, but was moved.

“Yet there were perhaps a couple of hours in her life more grim and horrible than any in that long night,” he went on, “the hours between ten o’clock and midnight yesterday.”

“Ah, but we don’t know how they were spent,” began Sir Chichester.

“We know something,” returned Martin gravely.  “I told you that that letter was corroborated before the paragraph it contained was inserted in the paper.”