'Perhaps I ought to begin by informing you,' said Camilla Payne, 'that I
have known Mr. Francis Tudor for about two years. Always he has been
very nice to me. Once he asked me to marry him--quite suddenly--it was a
year ago. I refused because I didn't care for him. I then saw nothing of
him for some time. But after I entered your service here, he came across
me again by accident. I did not know until lately that he had one of
your flats. He was very careful, very polite, timid, cautious--but very
obstinate, too. He invited me to call on him at his rooms, and to bring
any friends I liked. Of course, it was a stupidity on his part, but,
then, what else could he do? A man who wants to cultivate relations with
a homeless shopgirl is rather awkwardly fixed.'

'I wish to Heaven you would not talk like that, Miss Payne!' said Hugo,
interrupting her impatiently.

'I am merely telling you these things so that you may understand my
position,' Camilla coldly replied. 'Do you imagine that I am amusing
myself?'

'Go on, go on, I beg,' he urged, with a gesture of apology.

'Naturally, I declined the invitation. Then next I received a letter
from him, in which he said that unless I called on him, or agreed to
meet him in some place where we could talk privately and at length, he
should kill himself within a week. And he added that death was perhaps
less to him than I imagined. I believed that letter. There was something
about it that touched me.'