e hand-car at Sydenham, Mr. Narkom, and 'phone up
to London Bridge station; there are one or two points I wish to ask some
questions about. Afterward I'll hire a motor from some local garage and
join you at Norwood Junction in an hour's time. Let no one see the body
or enter the compartment where it lies until I come. One question,
however: is my memory at fault, or was it not Lord Stavornell who was
mixed up in that little affair with the French dancer, Mademoiselle
Fifi de Lesparre, who was such a rage in town about a year ago?"

"Yes; that's the chap," said Narkom in reply. "And a rare bad lot he has
been all his life, I can tell you. I dare say that Fifi herself was no
better than she ought to have been, chucking over her country-bred
husband as soon as she came into popularity, and having men of the
Stavornell class tagging after her; but whether she was or was not,
Stavornell broke up that home. And if that French husband had done the
right thing, he would have thrashed him within an inch of his life
instead of acting like a fool in a play and challenging him. Stavornell
laughed at the challenge, of course; and if all that is said of him is
true, he was at the bottom of the shabby trick which finally forced the
poor devil to get out of the country. When his wife, Fifi, left him, the
poor wretch nearly went off his head; and, as he hadn't fifty shillings
in the world, he was in a dickens of a pickle when _somebody_ induced a
lot of milliners, dressmakers, and the like, to whom it was said that
Fifi owed bills, to put their accounts into the hands of a collecting
agency and to proceed against him for settlement of his wife's accounts.
That was why he got out of the country post-haste. The case made a great
stir at the time, and the scandal of it was so great that, although the
fact never got into the papers, Stavornell's wife left him, refusing to
live another hour with such a man."

"Oh, he had a wife, then?"

"Yes; one of the most beautiful women in the kingdom. They had been
married only a year when the scandal of the Fifi affair arose. That was
another of his dirty tricks forcing that poor creature to marry him."

"She did so against her will?"

"Yes. She was engaged to another fellow at the time, an army chap who
was out in India. Her father, too, was an army man, a Colonel
Something-or-other, poor as the proverbial church mouse, addicted to
hard drinking, card-playing, horse-racing, and about as selfish an