He raised his glass. In the moment of silence, Grant said: “How long has she been able to see?”

Jack Lett, who was drinking (as Grant had intended him to be) when the question hit him, gulped wildly at his glass, upsetting half of it over his coat. His eyes bulged, as if the pressure of whisky had been forced up directly behind them. His face, never very healthy, took on a greenish tinge. Then he set down his glass, with a shaking hand, not bothering to mop up what he had spilt, and said: “You must be crazy!” His voice was a ludicrous, whispering parody of its normal tone; all bluff, all bounce, all confidence had been knocked out of it. “What do you mean, ‘how long’? Esther can’t see.”

“How long?” said Grant. “I’m just asking that.”

Jack Lett stared at him, his face blurred with doubt and indecision. It was easy to read his mind. He could not guess exactly how much Harry Grant knew; but it was enough that the one central fact had been confidently voiced. If that item could thus be thrown into the ring, then all their swindling world must be falling in ruins. But he tried once more, feebly.

“You’re way off the track, Harry.” His voice had a politician’s lilt. “Esther’s as blind as – as Charles Bannister, right this moment.”

Harry Grant looked at him. It was a look of complete loathing and disbelief, and it gave the other man no margin for denial, no shadow of hope.

“I know,” Grant said at last. “Get that, and cut the crap. I know. How long has she been able to see?”

Jack Lett, swallowing, said: “Since London.”

There was a long silence. Harry Grant, watching this defeated man who had so easily surrendered, was conscious not of victory but of a sick disgust at what he had learned. So it was true, all that he had suspected – the whole thing was a swindle, and Esther was a liar, double-dyed, inhumanly dishonest. But of course she must have been cruelly forced …

“What happened in London?” he asked finally, when the harrowing silence had stretched far beyond his choice.

“I don’t know at all,” answered Jack Lett. The question told him of an essential gap in Grant’s knowledge, and he now made a swift effort of recovery, raising fresh defences as fast as his slick brain and weasel tongue could work. “Some accident, I guess. I only learned about it a lot later … You know me, Harry – I just sell the toys and the uniforms. I’m not part of the main organization at all,” he continued briskly – and Harry Grant wanted to sock him for it. “The meetings are nothing to do with me. Just the toys – that’s my line … There’s never been any guarantee about Esther being blind, with them, has there?”

“You bastard,” said Grant.

“All right – so she can see!” Lett was now accumulating a horrible jaunty self-confidence, drawing round him the chips of his cast-iron assurance. “What’s the difference, anyway? We’re making money for the blind, aren’t we?” He saw that Harry Grant had risen, and he rose too, his face derisive and yet quailing at the same time. “We’re all in it together – you’re in it, too … Get wise to that, Harry: you make money, writing all that stuff about it – and you’re another one who’d like to lay her, aren’t you? … I was getting out, anyway,” he said, suddenly fearful, falling back a swift step as he saw Grant’s expression. “I’ve made my dough. I’m satisfied.”