“I remember,” I said shortly.  He glanced from me to Alison and quickly away.

“The truth can’t hurt me,” he said, “but it’s devilish unpleasant.  Alison, you know all this.  You would better go out.”

His use of her name crazed me.  I stepped in front of her and stood over him.  “You will not bring Miss West into the conversation,” I threatened, “and she will stay if she wishes.”

“Oh, very well,” he said with assumed indifference.  Hotchkiss just then escaped from Richey’s grasp and crossed the room.

“Did you ever wear glasses?” he asked eagerly.

“Never.”  Sullivan glanced with some contempt at mine.

“I’d better begin by going back a little,” he went on sullenly.  “I suppose you know I was married to Ida Harrington about five years ago.  She was a good girl, and I thought a lot of her.  But her father opposed the marriage—­he’d never liked me, and he refused to make any sort of settlement.

“I had thought, of course, that there would be money, and it was a bad day when I found out I’d made a mistake.  My sister was wild with disappointment.  We were pretty hard up, my sister and I.”

I was watching Alison.  Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and she was staring out of the window at the cheerless roof below.  She had set her lips a little, but that was all.

“You understand, of course, that I’m not defending myself,” went on the sullen voice.  “The day came when old Harrington put us both out of the house at the point of a revolver, and I threatened—­I suppose you know that, too—­I threatened to kill him.

“My sister and I had hard times after that.  We lived on the continent for a while.  I was at Monte Carlo and she was in Italy.  She met a young lady there, the granddaughter of a steel manufacturer and an heiress, and she sent for me.  When I got to Rome the girl was gone.  Last winter I was all in—­social secretary to an Englishman, a wholesale grocer with a new title, but we had a row, and I came home.  I went out to the Heaton boys’ ranch in Wyoming, and met Bronson there.  He lent me money, and I’ve been doing his dirty work ever since.”

Sullivan got up then and walked slowly forward and back as he talked, his eyes on the faded pattern of the office rug.

“If you want to live in hell,” he said savagely, “put yourself in another man’s power.  Bronson got into trouble, forging John Gilmore’s name to those notes, and in some way he learned that a man was bringing the papers back to Washington on the Flier.  He even learned the number of his berth, and the night before the wreck, just as I was boarding the train, I got a telegram.”

Hotchkiss stepped forward once more importantly.  “Which read, I think:  ‘Man with papers in lower ten, car seven.  Get them.’”

Sullivan looked at the little man with sulky blue eyes.

“It was something like that, anyhow.  But it was a nasty business, and it made matters worse that he didn’t care that a telegram which must pass through a half dozen hands was more or less incriminating to me.