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166 above all, to her knowledge of his innocence. He might even have threatened, have coolly and seriously told her that he would lay information against her unless she gave up his letter to him. But he was not dealing, he felt, with a woman in a passion; he was dealing with a cold, well-planned plot, conceived perhaps in anger, but thought out by a very calm and calculating brain. There was not, he felt, even an outside chance that, having worked it out so carefully, she would hold her hand at the last moment. True, he held now in his own hand evidence against her for blackmail sufficient to secure her, if he chose, a severe sentence. Only he could not do it; he had not nerve enough to take that step. She had calculated on that, no doubt. She had calculated correctly.

Then this money must be raised somehow; there was no way out. In order to silence a false accusation against himself he had to pay £10,000. It was this question of how to get it that he carried about with him all the morning, and this that had sat beside him at lunch. Gallio might possibly lend it him, but it would entail telling Gallio the whole story, which he did not in the least wish to do. However, if no better means offered itself he determined to telegraph to him that evening. And so at a quarter to four, his brain still going its dreary rounds from point to point of his difficulties, he again presented himself at the Carlton.

He was shown by the noiseless valet through the noiseless door of Mr. Palmer's sitting-room. The latter had not heard him enter, and Bertie, in the strangeness of the sight that met his eye, forgot for a moment his own entanglements. For Lewis Palmer was seated in an easy-chair by the window, doing nothing. His arms hung limply by his side, his head was half sunk into his chest, and his whole attitude expressed a lassitude that was indescribable. But next minute he half turned his head languidly towards the door, and saw Bertie standing there.