r one," said I.

"Underground, you mean?"

"Yes--partly."

I could not help staring now. Mrs. Ricardo had reddened so inexplicably.

"There was no need to tell me the other part!" she said, scornfully. "I
was in it--as you know very well!"

Then I did know. She was the bedizened beauty who had raked in the
five-pound notes, and smashed a magnum of champagne in her excitement,
at the orgy in Sir Christopher Stainsby's billiard room.

"I know it now," I stammered, "but I give you my word----"

"Fiddle!" she interrupted. "You've known it all the time. I've seen it
in your face. He gave me away to you, and I shan't forgive him!"

I found myself involved in a heated exposition of the facts. I had never
recognised her until that very minute. But I had kept wondering where we
had met before. And that was all that she could have seen in my face. As
for Uvo Delavoye, when I had spoken to him about it, he had merely
assured me that I must have seen her on the stage: so far and no further
had he given her away. Mrs. Ricardo took some assuring and reassuring on
the point. But the truth was in me, and in her ultimate pacification she
seemed to lose sight of the fact that she herself had done what she
accused Uvo of doing. Evidently the leakage of her secret mattered far
less to Mrs. Ricardo than the horrible thought that Mr. Delavoye had let
it out.

Of course I spoke as though there was nothing to matter in the least to
anybody, and asked after Sir Christopher as if the entertainment in his
billiard room had been one of the most conventional. It seemed that he
had married again in his old age; he had married one of the other ladies
of those very revels.

"That's really why I first thought of coming here to live," explained
Mrs. Ricardo, with her fine candour. "But there have been all kinds of
disagreeables."

She had known about the tunnel before she had heard of it from Uvo; some
member of the lively household had discovered its existence, and there
had been high jinks down there on more than one occasion. But Lady
Stainsby had not been the same person since her marriage. I gathered
that she had put her reformed foot down on the underground orgies, but
that Captain Ricardo had done his part in the subsequent disagreeables.
It further appeared that the blood-stained lace and the diamond buckle
had also been discovered, and that old Sir Christopher had "behaved just
like he would, and froze on to both without a word to