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Rh, not sufficiently stunned. It so happened that that creature was somewhere in the neighbourhood. How he found out … But it's his business to find out things. And he knows, too, how to worm his way in anywhere. Indeed, in the first days he was useful and somehow he made it look as if Heaven itself had sent him. In my distress I thought I could never sufficiently repay … Well, I have been paying ever since."

"What do you mean?" asked Mills softly. "In hard cash?"

"Oh, it's really so little," she said. "I told you it wasn't the worst case. I stayed on in that house from which I nearly ran away in my nightgown. I stayed on because I didn't know what to do next. He vanished as he had come on the track of something else, I suppose. You know he really has got to get his living some way or other. But don't think I was deserted. On the contrary. People were coming and going, all sorts of people that Henry Allègre used to know—or had refused to know. I had a sensation of plotting and intriguing around me, all the time. I was feeling morally bruised, sore all over, when, one day, Don Rafael de Villarel sent in his card. A grandee. I didn't know him, but, as you are aware, there was hardly a personality of mark or position that hasn't been talked about in the Pavilion before me. Of him I had only heard that he was a very austere and pious person, always at Mass, and that sort of thing. I saw a frail little man with a long, yellow face and sunken fanatical eyes, an Inquisitor, an unfrocked monk. One missed a rosary from his thin fingers. He gazed at me terribly and I couldn't imagine what he might want. I waited for him to pull out a crucifix and