ook of deep concern.

"You are in a tight place, my friend," he said. "Are you aware that you
are under the gravest suspicion of having murdered Levi Levison?"

"I am not surprised to hear it, since you knew of my engagement to meet
Levison on the marsh that night," replied Leslie. "I had more than half
expected that you would give evidence to that effect at the inquest."

Nugent brushed the insinuation aside with a contemptuous gesture. "My
dear Chermside, if you are going to approach the matter in that spirit,
we shall come to grief," he said. "Can't you see that our interests are
absolutely identical--that if you fall I fall too. Not quite so far
perhaps, but a good deal further than I care to contemplate. I don't
pretend to any affection for you, after the way you have played the
mischief with everything, but your arrest on this charge would mean my
social ruin--if nothing worse. The motive for your crime, and all that
led up to it, would be sure to come to light--even if you did not plead
guilty and put forward the motive as an extenuating circumstance."

This was selfish villainy, naked and unashamed, but it sounded like
honest villainy. Leslie had realized from the first that if his
appointment with Levison transpired, the case against him would be black
indeed, but he had expected that Nugent would rejoice in that fact. It
had not occurred to him that his former accomplice would be dragged down
in his fall.

"It will be time enough to talk of motive when I admit that I killed
Levison," he said, in a burst of indignation.

"You didn't kill him? There are no witnesses. Straight now, as from man
to man, standing on the brink of the same precipice?"

"I'll swear I didn't."

The shrug and the raised eyebrows with which Nugent received the denial
made Leslie itch to hit him, but his anger passed with the prompt
semi-withdrawal of the implied accusation.

"If you didn't someone else did. Let me think a moment," said Nugent,
and again he fell to tracing invisible patterns on the card table.
Leslie leaned against the wall by the door, and stared vacantly through
the window at faint specks on the horizon of the sunlit sea--Brixham
trawlers on the fishing-grounds twenty miles away. The dapper man in the
immaculate grey suit, solving unseen problems on the green cloth, had
disarmed him. Nugent's belief in his guilt, he told himself, had been
genuine, but Nugent had been shaken in that belief. He was striving for
s