“It wasn’t that,” she replied.  “He came to visit, me at Eastbourne, and he certainly knew all the tricks of making himself attractive and agreeable.  But he never won my heart—­he never even seriously took my fancy.  I married him because I believed that by doing so I was obeying my father’s wishes.”

“Where was your father at the time, then?” Francis asked.

“In South America.  Oliver Hilditch was nothing more than a discharged employé of his, discharged for dishonesty.  He had to leave South America; within a week to escape prosecution, and on the way to Europe he concocted the plot which very nearly ruined my life.  He forged a letter from my father, begging me, if I found it in any way possible, to listen to Oliver Hilditch’s proposals, and hinting guardedly at a very serious financial crisis which it was in his power to avert.  It never occurred to me or to my chaperon to question his bona fides.  He had lived under the same roof as my father, and knew all the intimate details of his life.  He was very clever and I suppose I was a fool.  I remember thinking I was doing quite a heroic action when I went to the registrar with him.  What it led to you know.”

There was a moment’s throbbing silence.  Francis, notwithstanding his deep pity, was conscious of an overwhelming sensation of relief.  She had never cared for Oliver Hilditch!  She had never pretended to!  He put the thought into words.

“You never cared for him, then?”

“I tried to,” she replied simply, “but I found it impossible.  Within a week of our marriage I hated him.”

Francis leaned back, his eyes half closed.  In his ears was the sonorous roar of Piccadilly, the hooting of motor-cars, close at hand the rustling of a faint wind in the elm trees.  It was a wonderful moment.  The nightmare with which he had grappled so fiercely, which he had overthrown, but whose ghost still sometimes walked by his side, had lost its chief and most poignant terror.  She had been tricked into the marriage.  She had never cared or pretended to care.  The primal horror of that tragedy which he had figured so often to himself, seemed to have departed with the thought.  Its shadow must always remain, but in time his conscience would acquiesce in the pronouncement of his reason.  It was the hand of justice, not any human hand, which had slain Oliver Hilditch.

“What did your father say when he discovered the truth?” he asked.

“He did not know it until he came to England—­on the day that Oliver Hilditch was acquitted.  My husband always pretended that he had a special mail bag going out to South America, so he took away all the letters I wrote to my father, and he took care that I received none except one or two which I know now were forgeries.  He had friends in South America himself who helped him—­one a typist in my father’s office, of whom I discovered afterwards—­but that really doesn’t matter.  He was a wonderful master of deceit.”