“Oh, no, Babs had it exactly,” Paul assured him. “She said she gave my letter to this fellow and he told her the writer had just been to bed with someone. Well, that’s why I admitted it. One thing if she’d said Is there someone else, a man can handle that sort of conversation easily enough, but being told precisely what had happened threw me for a loop and I said something stupid like How did you know? Denied it after, of course, but it was too late by then. She didn’t take it well at all. Said it was bad enough that I couldn’t be trusted or what-have-you without some ghastly little oik telling her I’d written my letter with sticky hands.”

“He said that?”

“No, I think that part was Babs.”

Aaron attempted to claw his way back to the conversation he wanted to have. “Are you in the habit of writing letters to one girl after bedding another?”

“Good Lord, Ronnie, you make it sound like a compulsion. We—Babs and I—needed to agree on the costumes rather urgently, that was all.”

“So the only people who could have known you wrote the letter in those circumstances were you, your lady friend—anyone else? Servants? A spare lady in the room?”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

“And did you brag about your conquest? Tell a friend, make a story of it?”

“Good heavens, man, what sort of fellow do you think I am?”

Aaron restrained himself. “Who was the other woman?”

“I’m not telling you that,” Paul said. “Have some decency.”

Wildsmith had been right about Aaron’s self-control to the extent that he didn’t spring on his cousin and throttle him. “For heaven’s sake, man, use your head. If you didn’t tell anyone about this letter, and nobody but this woman saw you write it—”

“Well, but she didn’t either,” Paul said with an air of mild triumph. “She’d already left. Having her hair done, you know, rushed off. And before you ask, I certainly didn’t tell her I was going to write to Babs. It was hardly her affair.”

Further questioning revealed that he’d put the letter in his pocket when he went to the post box rather than carrying it along the street in his hand, and that the lady friend was married to an elderly and very rich man from whom she had no intention of being parted till death did them.

Aaron left his cousin with one very strong conviction, which was that Paul could go to the devil. Other than that, he was bewildered.