myself that with Vereker's death the major incentive dropped. He
was still there to be honoured by what might be done--he was no
longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the
authority?

Two children were born to the pair, but the second cost the mother
her life. After this stroke I seemed to see another ghost of a
chance. I jumped at it in thought, but I waited a certain time for
manners, and at last my opportunity arrived in a remunerative way.
His wife had been dead a year when I met Drayton Deane in the
smoking-room of a small club of which we both were members, but
where for months--perhaps because I rarely entered it--I hadn't
seen him. The room was empty and the occasion propitious. I
deliberately offered him, to have done with the matter for ever,
that advantage for which I felt he had long been looking.

"As an older acquaintance of your late wife's than even you were,"
I began, "you must let me say to you something I have on my mind.
I shall be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name
for the information she must have had from George Corvick--the
information you know, that had come to him, poor chap, in one of
the happiest hours of his life, straight from Hugh Vereker."

He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. "The information--
?"

"Vereker's secret, my dear man--the general intention of his books:
the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the
figure in the carpet."