Mannering slowly subsided into his chair.  His cheeks were blanched.  Richard Fardell watched him with feverish anxiety.

“It is a lie,” Mannering declared.  “There is no man living who can say this.”

“The man says,” Fardell continued, stonily, “that his name is Parkins, and that he was butler to Mr. Stephen Phillimore eleven years ago.”

“Parkins is dead!” Mannering said, hoarsely.  “He has been dead for many years.”

“He is living in Leeds to-day,” Fardell answered.  “A journalist from the Yorkshire Herald was with him for two hours this afternoon.”

“Blanche—­I was told that he was dead,” Mannering said.

“Then the story is true?” Fardell asked.

“Not as you have told it,” Mannering answered.

“There is truth in it?”

“Yes.”

Richard Fardell was silent for several moments.  He paced up and down the room, his hands behind his back, his eyebrows contracted into a heavy frown.  For him it was a bitter moment.  He was only a half-educated, illiterate man, possessed of sturdy common sense and a wonderful tenacity of purpose.  He had permitted himself to indulge in a little silent but none the less absolute hero-worship, and Mannering had been the hero.

“You must come with me at once and see this man,” he said at last.  “He has not yet signed his statement.  We must do what we can to keep him quiet.”

Mannering took up his coat and hat without a word.  They left the hotel, and Fardell summoned a cab.

“It is a long way,” he explained.  “We will drive part of the distance and walk the rest.  We may be watched already.”

Mannering nodded.  The last blow was so unexpected that he felt in a sense numbed.  His speech only a few hours ago had made large inroads upon his powers of endurance.  His partial recantation had cost him many hours of torture, from which he was still suffering.  And now, without the slightest warning, he found himself face to face with a crisis far graver, far more acute.  Never in his most gloomy moments had he felt any real fear of a resurrection of the past such as that with which he was now threatened.  It was a thunderbolt from a clear sky.  Even now he found it hard to persuade himself that he was not dreaming.

They were in the cab for nearly half an hour before Fardell stopped and dismissed it.  Then they walked up and down and across streets of small houses, pitiless in their monotony, squalid and depressing in their ugliness.

Finally Fardell stopped, and without hesitation knocked at the door of one of them.  It was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves, holding a tallow candle in his hand.

“What yer want?” he inquired, suspiciously.

“Your lodger,” Fardell answered, pushing past him and drawing Mannering into the room.  “Where is he?”

The man jerked his thumb upwards.

“Where he won’t be long,” he answered, shortly.  “The likes of ’im having visitors, and one a toff, too.  Say, are yer going to pay his rent?”