by a more or less well-known
writer. Fallock, or Farrington, needed these outside contributions, not
only to give the newspaper a verisimilitude of genuineness, but also to
fill the columns of the journal.

He himself devoted his energies to two pages of shrewdly edited tit-bits
of information about the great. They were carefully written, often
devoid of any reference to the person whom they affected, and were more
or less innocuous. But in every batch of letters there were always one
or two which gave the master blackmailer an opportunity for extracting
money from people, who had been betrayed by servants or friends. There
was a standing offer in the _Gossip_ of five guineas for any paragraph
which might be useful to the editor, and it is a commentary upon the
morality of human nature that there were times when Farrington paid out
nearly a thousand pounds a week for the information which his
unscrupulous contributors gave him.

There was work here for Poltavo; he was an accomplished scholar, and a
shrewd man of affairs. If Farrington had been forced to accept his
service, having accepted them, he could do no less than admit the wisdom
of his choice. In his big study, with the door locked, Poltavo carefully
sorted the correspondence, thinking the while.

If he played his cards well he knew his future was assured. The
consequence of his present employment, the misery it might bring to the
innocent and to the foolishly guilty alike, did not greatly trouble him;
he was perfectly satisfied with his own position in the matter. He had
found a means of livelihood, which offered enormous rewards and the
minimum of risk. In his brief stay at the Secret House, Farrington had
impressed upon him the necessity for respecting trifles.

"If you can make five shillings out of a working man," was his dictum,
"make it. We cannot afford to despise the smallest amount," and in
consequence Poltavo was paying as much attention to the ill-written and
illiterate scrawls which came from the East End of London, as he was to
the equally illiterate efforts of the under-butler, describing an error
of his master's in a northern ducal seat. Poltavo went through the
letters systematically, putting this epistle to the right, and that to
the left; this to make food for the newspaper; that, as a subject for
further operations. Presently he stopped and looked up at the ceiling.

"So she must marry Frank Doughton within a week," he said to himself in