“I wanted to talk to you about Arthur Gine,” Gilder broke in upon her horrified wonder. “We’re not good friends, but that doesn’t mean I bear him any malice. But naturally, as we are parted, I don’t feel called upon to protect him and stand between him and his dupes” – he emphasised the last word – “as I have done in the past. You know him as well as I do,” he went on, as she was about to speak. “You know his vanity; you know how perfectly unreliable and insincere he is; you know too that he’d get out of any promise he ever made, even if it was in black and white.”

He was watching her narrowly all the time he spoke, and now he saw her eyebrows arch.

“Indeed?” she said coldly. “I don’t know anything about the law, but I can’t see how a gentleman, or a common man for the matter of that, could get out of – what is the expression – legal obligations?”

“Then you don’t know Arthur Gine as well as I do,” he said. “But that is beside the point. I haven’t come here to blackguard him or to make him look smaller in your eyes. Not that I could,” he said, anticipating her protest a little ambiguously. “But I believe in a girl having a square deal, especially a working girl who may have nobody in the world to look after her interests. And I tell you that that fellow couldn’t go straight if he was fired from a gun. Now what about the Chelford treasure?”

At the words she sat bolt upright, and a look of blank astonishment came to her face.

“Do you know?” she gasped.

“Of course I know! You’re going to help him find the gold, and in return–” He paused.

That was exactly what he had come to find out. What obligation had Arthur undertaken in return for the information she would give him? And he was pretty sure of his ground. He knew the girl; had had some dealings with her when she was with Chelford; and since he lived on his knowledge of human beings, he had analysed her with more or less accuracy. He knew her vanity, her ambition; had heard something of her summary discharge from Fossaway Manor. There was only one reward that Arthur Gine could offer.

“He has promised to marry you,” he said, and he was not altogether drawing a bow at a venture.