"I see--you call that done. But how did you manage to get him away from the neighbourhood of the house?"
"There was a motor-car a little way along the path, about as silent a one as there is made; I put him in that and off I went."
"Nothing could be simpler, could it? But why did you trouble to take him at all? What affair was he of yours? It wasn't as though he had treated you very nicely."
"Don't you see that it was the chance of my life?"
"The chance of your life? Good gracious! How?"
"That poker business--they said I cheated; it was a lie--an infernal lie."
"They've admitted it themselves to-night."
"They hadn't admitted it then, and I never thought I should have a chance of making them do it, until I saw that dear man Dodwell doing his best to murder Draycott as he lay there on the floor. Well, then, it was a wild-cat idea, but it was an idea. I thought that if I could get hold of Draycott, and he wasn't quite dead, and I could bring him back to life, he might feel some--some sort of gratitude. It was Draycott who supported Dodwell; I don't think they would ever have believed him if it hadn't been for Draycott. I fancy there wasn't a man in the regiment who hadn't a sort of feeling that Dodwell was a liar; it was Draycott's endorsement of his lie that did it."
She could see, when he paused, how the muscles of his face were working, and how his fingers twitched as he clenched and unclenched his hands.
"When I started to think afterwards, when hell was all about me, at first it was all a blur, I couldn't think how it could have happened--all of it; it was so--so impossible that they could have thought such a thing of me. Then, by degrees, I began to put trifles together, and to get some sort of a vague idea how--how it had all come about."
He pressed his hands to his temples; she fancied it must have become a trick with him; he had done it once or twice before, even when they were in the cab.
"I'd had a row with Dodwell about some money which he said I owed him; as you know, I owed pretty nearly everybody money, but I was quite sure I didn't owe him any. The way in which he made out that I did, did credit to something besides his financial genius. I had a suspicion that Draycott had had a row with him of the same kind. He had told me that he would be even with me for the position which I had taken up; and I began to see, afterwards, when I--I was looking for crusts in the gutter, that that lie he had told was his way of getting even, and I began to wonder if Draycott had backed it because Dodwell had got him under his thumb."