Falconer nodded.

“The treaty that enabled you to hand over so many thousand square miles to the government in exchange for a knighthood.”

“No,” said Sir Stephen, simply.  “I got that for another business; but I daresay the other thing helped.  It doesn’t matter.  Then I—­I married.  I married the daughter of a man of position, a girl who—­who loved and trusted me; who knew nothing of the past you and I know; and as I would rather have died than that she should have known anything of it, I—­”

“Conveniently and decently buried it,” put in Falconer.  “Oh, yes, I can see the whole thing!  You had blossomed out from Black Steve—­”

Sir Stephen rose and took a step towards the door, then remembered that he had shut it and sank down again, his face white as ashes, his lips quivering.

—­“To Sir Stephen Orme, the African millionaire, the high and lofty English gentleman with his head full of state secrets, and his safe full of foreign loans; Sir Stephen Orme, the pioneer, the empire maker—­Oh, yes, I can understand how naturally you would bury the past—­as you had buried your old pal and partner.  The dainty and delicate Lady Orme was to hear nothing—­” Sir Stephen rose and stretched out his hand half warningly half imploringly.

“She’s dead, Falconer!” he said, hoarsely.  “Don’t—­don’t speak of her!  Leave her out, for God’s sake!”

Falconer shrugged his shoulders.

“And this boy of yours—­he’s as ignorant as her ladyship was, of course?”

Sir Stephen inclined his head.

“Yes,” he said, huskily.  “He—­he knows nothing.  He thinks me—­what the world sees me, what all the world, saving you, Falconer, thinks me:  one who has risen from humble but honest poverty to—­what I am.  You have seen him, you can understand what I feel; that I’d rather die than that he should know—­that he should think badly of me.  Falconer, I have made a clean breast of it—­I’m in your hands.  I’m—­I’m at your mercy.  I appeal to you”—­he stretched out his white, shapely hands—­“you have a child of your own:  she’s as dear to you as mine is to me—­I’ve watched you to-night, and I’ve seen you look at her as she moved about and talked and sang, with the look that my eyes wear when they rest on my boy.  I am at your mercy—­not only mine, but my son’s future—­”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and drew a long breath.

Falconer leant back and smoked contemplatively, with a coolness, an indifference to the other’s emotion which Sir Stephen found well-nigh maddening.

“Yes,” said Falconer, after a pause, “I suppose your house of cards would come down with a crash if I opened my mouth say, at breakfast to-morrow morning, and told—­well, all I know of the great Sir Stephen Orme when he bore the name of Black Steve.  Even you, with all you colossal assurance, could not face it or outlive it.  And as for the boy—­it would settle his hash now and forever.  A word from me would do it, eh, Orme?  And upon my soul I don’t know why I shouldn’t say it!  I’ve had it in my mind, I’ve kept it as a sweet morsel for a good many years.  Yes, I’ve been looking forward to it.  I’ve been waiting for the ‘physiological moment,’ as I think they call it; and it strikes me that it has arrived.”