to be
waiting to hear what else he had to say.

"Don't you understand?" he went on impatiently. "You have only to tell
Dane that I am neither Douglas nor Philip, but curiously like both, and
he will chuck the thing up. He must. Then I shall be safe. You see that,
don't you?"

"Yes, I see that," she admitted.

"Well?"

"Tell me exactly how much of Douglas' money you have spent?" she
demanded.

"Only the loose money from the pocketbook. Not all of that. I am earning
money now."

She leaned across the table.

"What about the twenty thousand pounds?"

"I haven't touched it," he assured her, "not a penny."

"On your honour?"

He rose silently and went to his desk, unlocked one of the drawers, and
drew from a hidden place a thin strip of paper. He smoothed it out on the
table before her.

"There's the deposit note," he said,--"_Twenty thousand pounds to the
joint or separate credit of Beatrice Wenderley and Douglas Romilly, on
demand_. The money's there still. I haven't touched it."

She gripped the paper in her fingers. The sight of the figures seemed to
fascinate her. Then she looked around.

"How can you afford to live in a place like this, then?" she demanded
suspiciously. "Where does your money come from?"

"The play," he told her.

"What, all this?" she exclaimed.

"It is a great success. The theatre is packed every night. My royalties
come every week to far more than I could spend."

She looked once more around her, gripped the deposit note in her fingers,
and leaned back in her chair. She laughed curiously. Her eyes had
travelled back to Philip's anxious face.

"Wonderful!" she murmured. "You paid the price, but you've won. You've
had something for it. I paid the price, and up till now--"

She stared at the paper in her hand. Then she looked away into the fire.

"I can't get it all into my head," she went on. "I pictured him here,
living in luxury, spending the money of which he had promised me a
share ... and he's dead! That was his body--that unrecognisable thing
they found in the canal. You killed him--Douglas! He was so fond of life,
too."

"Fond of the things which meant life to him," Philip muttered.

"I should never have believed that you had the courage," she observed
ruminatingly. "After all, then, he wasn't faithless. He wasn't the brute
I thought him."

She sat thinking for what seemed to him to be an interminable time. He
broke in at last upon her meditations.

"Well," he