Conquest’s smoking-room, with its space and height, its deep leather arm-chairs, its shaded lamps, its cheerful fire, suggested a club rather than a private dwelling, and invited the most taciturn guest to confidence.  Ford stretched himself before the blaze with an enjoyment rendered keener by the thought that it might be long before he had occasion to don a dinner-jacket again, or taste such a good Havana.  Though it was only the evening of his arrival, he was eager to give himself up.  Now that he had “squared himself,” as he expressed it, with Miriam Strange, he felt he had put the last touch to his preparations.  Kilcup and Warren were holding him back for a day or two, but his own promptings were for haste.

“I admit,” Conquest continued to explain, as he fidgeted about the room, moving a chair here, or an ash-tray there, with the fussiness of an old bachelor of housekeeping tastes—­“I admit that I thought the old woman was trying it on at first.  But I came to the conclusion that she had told a true story from the start.  When she gave her evidence at your trial she thought you were—­the man.”

“There’s nothing surprising in that.  They almost made me think so, too.”

“It did look fishy, my friend.  You won’t mind my saying that much.  Clearer heads than your jury of village store-keepers and Adirondack farmers might have given the same verdict.  But old lady Gramm’s responsibility hadn’t begun then.  It was a matter of two or three years before she came to see—­as women do see things about the men they live with—­that the hand which did the job was Jacob’s.  By that time you had disappeared into space, and she didn’t feel bound to give the old chap away.  She says she would have done it if it could have saved you; but since you had saved yourself, she confined her attentions to shielding Jacob.  You may credit as much or as little of that as you please; but I believe the bulk of it.  In any case, since it does the trick for us we have no reason to complain.  Come now!”

“I’m not going to complain of anything.  It’s been a rum experience all through, but I can’t say that, in certain aspects, I haven’t enjoyed it.  I have enjoyed it.  If it weren’t for the necessity of deceiving people who are decent to you, I’d go through it all again.”

“That’s game,” Conquest said, approvingly, as he worked round to the hearth-rug, where he stood cutting the end of a cigar, with Ford’s long figure stretched out obliquely before him.

“I would,” Ford assured him.  “I’d go through it all again, like a shot.  It’s been a lark from—­I won’t say from start to finish—­but certainly from the minute—­let me see just when!—­certainly from the minute when Miss Strange beckoned to me, over old Wayne’s shoulder.”

An odd look came by degrees into Conquest’s face—­the look of pitying amusement with which one listens to queer things said by some one in delirium.  He kept the cutter fixed in the end of the cigar, too much astonished to complete his task.