ch you have
taken such vast pains to keep for fifteen years.

"I think you are quite competent to read my meaning, and
I now confidently expect to hear that you will take
pleasure in obliging me in the way which I indicated to
you in my previous letters.

"Yours faithfully,

"FRANK BURCHILL."

Barthorpe read this communication three times, pausing over every
sentence, seeking to read the meanings, the implications, the subtly
veiled threat. When he folded the square sheet and replaced it in the
letter-case he half spoke one word:

"Blackmail!"

Then, staring in apparent idleness about the little restaurant, with its
gilt-framed mirrors, its red, plush-covered seats, its suggestion of
foreign atmosphere and custom, he idly drummed the tips of his fingers
on the table, and thought. Naturally, he thought of the writer of the
letter. Of course, he said to himself, of course he knew Burchill.
Burchill had been Jacob Herapath's private secretary for rather more
than a year, and it was now about six months since Jacob had got rid of
him. He, Barthorpe, remembered very well why Jacob had quietly dismissed
Burchill. One day Jacob had said to him, with a dry chuckle:

"I'm getting rid of that secretary of mine--it won't do."

"What won't do?" Barthorpe had asked.

"He's beginning to make eyes at Peggie," Jacob had answered with another
chuckle, "and though Peggie's a girl of sense, that fellow's too good
looking to have about a house. I never ought to have had him. However--he
goes."

Barthorpe, as he ate the cutlets and sipped the half-bottle of claret
which the waiter presently brought him, speculated on these facts and
memories. He was not very sure about Burchill's antecedents: he believed
he was a young man of good credentials and high respectability--personally,
he had always wondered why old Jacob Herapath, a practical business man,
should have taken as a private secretary a fellow who looked, dressed,
spoke, and behaved like a play-actor. As it all came within the scope of
things he mused on Burchill and his personal appearance, calling up the
ex-secretary's graceful and slender figure, his oval, olive-tinted face,
his large, dark, lustrous eyes, his dark, curling hair, his somewhat
affected dress, his tall, wide-brimmed hats, his taper fingers, his
big, wide-ended cravats. It had once amused Barthorpe--and many other
p