“It isn’t my affair,” she declared. “Gray now knows that the money you borrowed from him was in order to help your fellow-criminal—a man who once did him an evil turn—after he had served his sentence. He wants his money back, and he is going to take it. The property will be up for auction in a week or so.”

“But I won’t be swindled in this way!” cried old Mr Homfray.

“Act just as you wish—but remember, if you make any move it will be the worse for you. Gordon is not a man to stick at trifles,” the woman said.

“I know that,” said the rector.

“And it is a very ugly skeleton you have in your cupboard,” remarked the woman with a sinister smile.

“The property at Totnes is worth over four thousand pounds,” he said.

“You have only to repay the money with interest and the matter is ended.”

Mr Homfray paused.

Then, looking straight into the woman’s evil face, he said:

“It is you, woman, who once swore to ruin me because I would not assist you in that vile plot of yours! You thought to trap me, a minister of the Church, into assisting you to entice that fly into the web you had so cunningly spun for him. But you were mistaken! I saw through your evil game, and because I did so you vowed vengeance upon me. And this is the hour of your triumph!” he added bitterly in a deep, hoarse voice, and one quite unusual to him.

The woman’s thin lips were pressed together, but she made no immediate reply.

At last she said:

“I am only here on Mr Gray’s behalf.”

“But it is you who have goaded him to do this—to take this action, well knowing that at the moment I cannot pay.”

“That surely is not my affair,” snapped the woman, while old Mr Homfray stood aghast at the sudden blow which had fallen to crush him.

What would his son Roddy think if he learnt the truth concerning that closed chapter of his father’s past? What would the parish of Little Farncombe say if they knew that their respected rector had fallen among thieves?

“Won’t 

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