e mentioned me before she died,' he said
slowly.

'Yes,' Margaret answered after a moment's pause; 'she did.'

'What did she say?'

'She told me that it was a secret, but that I was to tell you what she
said, if I thought it best.'

'Are you going to tell me?'

It was impossible to guess whether he was controlling any emotion or
not; but if the men with whom he had done business where large sums
were involved had seen him now and had heard his voice, they would
have recognised the tone and the expression.

'She said, "he did it,"' Margaret answered slowly, after a moment's
thought.

'Was that all she said?'

'That was all. A moment later she was dead. Before she said it, she
told me it was a secret, and she made me promise solemnly never to
tell any one but you.'

'It's not much of a secret, is it?' As he spoke, Mr. Van Torp turned
his eyes from Margaret's at last and looked at the grey sea beyond the
ventilator.

'Such as it is, I have told it to you because she wished me to,'
answered Margaret. 'But I shall never tell any one else. It will be
all the easier to be silent, as I have not the least idea what she
meant.'

'She meant our engagement,' said Mr. Van Torp in a matter-of-fact
tone. 'We had broken it off that afternoon. She meant that it was I
who did it, and so it was. Perhaps she did not like to think that when
she was dead people might call her heartless and say she had thrown me
over; and no one would ever know the truth except me, unless I chose
to tell--me and her father.'

'Then you were not to be married after all!' Margaret showed her
surprise.

'No. I had broken it off. We were going to let it be known the next
day.'

'On the very eve of the wedding!'

'Yes.' Mr. Van Torp fixed his eyes on Margaret's again. 'On the very
eve of the wedding,' he said, repeating her words.

He spoke very slowly and without emphasis, but with the greatest
possible distinctness. Margaret had once been taken to see a motor-car
manufactory and she remembered a machine that clipped bits off the
end of an iron bar, inch by inch, smoothly and deliberately. Mr. Van
Torp's lips made her think of that; they seemed to cut the hard words
one by one, in lengths.

'Poor girl!' she sighed, and looked away.

The man's face did not change, and if his next words echoed the
sympathy she expressed his tone did not.

'I was a good deal cut up myself,' he observed coolly. 'Here's your
book, Madame Cordova.'

'No,'