“I don’t know what all this is about,” Jimmy interposed, his voice making Skye start, for she had almost forgotten his existence, “but I am certain of one thing, that you are the nephew of Sir Rupert Tremayne. You have a decided look of him. If I closed my eyes it might be him speaking.”

There was a sudden tense silence.

“Whom are you talking about?” El Diablo asked at length.

“You!” Jimmy replied. “And I am glad to meet you, Guy Tremayne. I have been looking for you for a great many years. Since the end of I938 to be exact.”

“Guy Tremayne doesn’t exist,” El Diablo said fiercely.

“I think he does, even though he has changed his name,” Jimmy replied. “Did you know that your uncle was dead?”

“No. When did he die?”

“In I943. A heart attack brought on by doing too much in the local Home Guard. He always hoped, until the very last, that you would come back.”

“I have finished with England.”

There was a pause before he asked in a low voice,

“What has happened to Pauline?”

Skye felt her heart turn over at the question.

She hated this woman whom El Diablo had loved and whose cupidity and cowardice had driven him away from his home.

“Pauline is dead too.”

The words, spoken in Jimmy’s even tones, were somehow sensational.

“Dead?”

“Yes. She was killed in an air raid early in I945. She went to London after your uncle’s death. Her excuse was war work, but I think actually she enjoyed the excitement of seeing people and of being in the thick of things despite the danger from bombs.”

“Poor Pauline!”

There was a gentleness in his tone that made Skye hate her the more and then El Diablo said with a sigh,

“That lays the last of my ghosts. Now I am free of England for ever.”

“Cannot you forgive him after all these years?”

It was Skye who spoke, unable to keep back the words that came impulsively to her lips.

“Forgive my uncle?” El Diablo repeated and then added reflectively, “I suppose it doesn’t matter now whether I forgive him or not. I can’t imagine him dead. I have always thought of him as being at Bredon, cursing me and believing me to be a thief. I have hated him all these years and half of the time he was not there to hate. What a fool one can make of oneself!”

It was the most self-revealing speech Skye had heard from him.

Impulsively she put out her hand and laid it on his.

“You must have suffered,” she said. “You were too young to go out into the world entirely on your own.”

“I took some hard knocks,” El Diablo agreed, “but it made a man of me. It taught me to trust no one.”