her eyes for once wavered from his face, and she lowered
her head. Garratt Skinner, however, seemed not to notice her confusion.

"You remember," he continued, "that I tried to stop them playing cards at
the beginning. I yielded in the end, because it became perfectly clear
that if I didn't they would go away and play elsewhere, while I at all
events could keep the points down in my own house. I ought to have stayed
up, I suppose, until they went away. I blame myself there a little. But I
had no idea they would stay so late. Are you sure it was their voices you
heard and not the servants moving?"

He asked the question almost carelessly, but his eyes rather belied his
tone, for they watched her intently.

"Quite sure," she answered.

"You might have made a mistake."

"No; for I saw them."

Garratt Skinner covered his mouth with his hand. It seemed to Sylvia that
he smiled. A suspicion flashed across her mind, in spite of herself. Was
he merely testing her to see whether she would speak the truth or not?
Did he know that she had come down the stairs in the early morning? She
thrust the suspicion aside, remembering the self-reproach which suspicion
had already caused her at this very luncheon table. If it were true that
her father knew, why then Barstow or Parminter must have told him this
very morning. And if he had seen either of them this morning, all his
talk to her in this cool and quiet place was a carefully prepared
hypocrisy. No, she would not believe that.

"You saw them?" he exclaimed. "Tell me how."

She told him the whole story, how she had come down the staircase,
what she had seen, as she leaned over the balustrade, and how
Parminter had turned.

"Do you think he saw you?" asked her father.

Sylvia looked at him closely. But he seemed really anxious to know.

"I think he saw something," she answered. "Whether he knew that it was I
whom he saw, I can't tell."

Garratt Skinner sat for a little while smoking his cigar in short,
angry puffs.

"I wouldn't have had that happen for worlds," he said, with a frown. "I
have no doubt whatever that the slips of paper on which poor Hine was
trying to write were I.O.U's. Heaven knows what he lost last night."

"I know," returned Sylvia. "He lost L480 last night."

"Impossible," cried Garratt Skinner, with so much violence that the
people lunching at the tables near-by looked up at the couple with
surprise. "Oh, no! I'll not believe it, Sylvia." And as he