“No,” I answered hoarsely.  “I cannot tell you.  I will have no more to do with it.  The matter is over—­let it rest,”

“But, my poor boy,” she said quietly, “it will not be allowed to rest.  Can’t you see that this girl’s statement does away with the theory that he was washed up from the sea?  He met with his death there on the sands.  He left Braster to visit you, and he was found within a few yards of your cottage dead, and with marks of violence upon him.  You will be suspected, perhaps charged.  It is inevitable.  Now tell me the truth.  Was Mostyn Ray in Braster at the time?”

“He lectured that night in the village,” I answered.

Her eyes gleamed with a strange fire.

“I knew it!” she exclaimed.  “I have him at last, then.  I saw him falter when I spoke of your father.  Guy, I will save you, but I would give the rest of my days to bring this home to Mostyn Ray.”

I shook my head.

“You will never do it,” I declared.  “There might be suspicion, but there will never be any proof.  If there was any murder done at all, it was done without witnesses.”

“We shall see about that,” she muttered.  “There is what you call circumstantial evidence.  It has hanged people before now.”

We remained silent for several moments.  All this time she was watching me.

“Guy,” she said softly, “you are very like what he was—­at your age.”

Her cloak had fallen back.  She was wearing a black evening gown with a string of pearls around her neck.  The excitement had given her a faint colour, and something like tears softened her eyes as she looked across at me.  But the more I looked at her the more anxious I was to see her no more.  Her words reminded me of the past.  I remembered that it was she who had been my father’s evil genius, she who had brought this terrible disgrace upon him, and this cloud over my own life.  I rose to my feet.

“I do not wish to ask for any favours from you,” I said, “but I will ask you to remember that if you are seen here I shall certainly lose my post.”

“What does it matter?” she answered contemptuously.  “I am not a rich woman, Guy, but I know how to earn money.  Mostyn Ray would not believe it, perhaps, but I loved your father.  Yours has been a miserable little life.  Come with me, and I promise that I will show you how to make it great.  You have no relatives or any ties.  I promise you that I will be a model stepmother.”

I looked at her, bewildered.

“It is not possible for me to do anything of the sort,” I told her.  “I do not wish to seem unkind, but nothing in this world would induce me to consider such a thing for a moment.  I have chosen my life and the manner of it.  Do you think that I can ever forget that you and my father between you broke my mother’s heart, and made it necessary for me to be brought up without friends, ashamed of my name and of my history?  One does not forget these things.  I bear you no ill will, but I wish that you would go away.”