The flush had faded in an instant, and a deathly face was before me. Her dry lips could not speak the “No” which I saw rather than heard.

“Surely your memory deceives you,” said I. “I could even quote a passage of your letter. It ran ‘Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o’clock.’”

I thought that she had fainted, but she recovered herself by a supreme effort.

“Is there no such thing as a gentleman?” she gasped.

“You do Sir Charles an injustice. He did burn the letter. But sometimes a letter may be legible even when burned. You acknowledge now that you wrote it?”

“Yes, I did write it,” she cried, pouring out her soul in a torrent of words. “I did write it. Why should I deny it? I have no reason to be ashamed of it. I wished him to help me. I believed that if I had an interview I could gain his help, so I asked him to meet me.”

“But why at such an hour?”

“Because I had only just learned that he was going to London next day and might be away for months. There were reasons why I could not get there earlier.”

“But why a rendezvous in the garden instead of a visit to the house?”

“Do you think a woman could go alone at that hour to a bachelor’s house?”

“Well, what happened when you did get there?”

“I never went.”

“Mrs. Lyons!”

“No, I swear it to you on all I hold sacred. I never went. Something intervened to prevent my going.”

“What was that?”

“That is a private matter. I cannot tell it.”

“You acknowledge then that you made an appointment with Sir Charles at the very hour and place at which he met his death, but you deny that you kept the appointment.”

“That is the truth.”

Again and again I cross-questioned her, but I could never get past that point.

“Mrs. Lyons,” said I as I rose from this long and inconclusive interview, “you are taking a very great responsibility and putting yourself in a very false position by not making an absolutely clean breast of all that you know. If I have to call in the aid of the police you will find how seriously you are compromised. If your position is innocent, why did you in the first instance deny having written to Sir Charles upon that date?”

“Because I feared that some false conclusion might be drawn from it and that I might find myself involved in a scandal.”

“And why were you so pressing that Sir Charles should destroy your letter?”

“If you have read the letter you will know.”

“I did not say that I had read all the letter.”

“You quoted some of it.”