“Yes. He told me all about that,” said Henry; and Shelley laughed.

“I doubt if he told you all,” the detective remarked. “Did he tell you, for instance, that he was sent to prison for complicity in a most ingenious fraud, perpetrated jointly on a bank and an insurance company?”

“I must say,” Henry admitted, “that when I found out a little about his way of life I began to wonder if there might be something of that sort. He swore that he was innocent, of course. He said that he was ‘framed-up’—at least, I think that was the phrase—by a gang who wanted to get rid of him. I suppose it was a complete untruth; was it not?”

Shelley inclined his head gravely. “I’m afraid he seriously deceived you, Mr. Fairhurst,” he admitted.

“I suppose it was my own fault for succumbing so easily to the blandishments of a stranger in the British Museum Library that day,” Henry said. “But you see so many interesting people meet there that one somehow feels there is a sort of freemasonry of learning there.”

Shelley looked thoughtful. “Yes; I suppose there is something of that kind of feeling,” he said. “Just the same way as I feel a fellow-feeling for a policeman anywhere. Yes; I see that.”

“But it was not so, Mr. Shelley,” complained Henry. “You see, to begin with we used to have occasional meals together; and he used to tell me all about the dreadful times he had at Dartmoor; and what wicked men there were there; and all that sort of thing.”

Shelley nodded. “I understand,” he said.

“Well,” Henry continued. “That was how it began; but after it had been going on for a month or two I realised that I always paid for those meals. And, if I happened to suggest a drink, it always happened, after I had paid for one, that he had some highly important business elsewhere, and so was not able to stay to pay for his. All little things, but they began to get on my nerves.”

Shelley again nodded sympathetically.

“And then,” Henry went on, conscious of an attentive audience, “he began to borrow money from me. Only small sums, you understand. A shilling now, and half a crown next week.”

The train roared on through the night; and Henry paused as it passed into a tunnel, the reverberations being too loud to allow easy conversation. Shelley seized the opportunity to refill his pipe, and to get it going again, disregarding the coughs of Henry Fairhurst as the rank smoke puffed out into the compartment.

“This borrowing business,” Henry resumed as soon as the tunnel was past, “continued for a long time. At first he paid the money back regularly, then there were occasions when I had to remind him that he had not paid me back. It was a most disagreeable affair, I can assure you, Mr. Shelley.”