did not mean anything very particular to him, but he saw further than that. Should he pay it, the very fact of his payment was equivalent, to his shrewd American brain, to a confession of his guilt. What if he paid only to find that he had clinched the proof against himself? And if he did not pay, if he shrugged his shoulders at the whole matter, what if the ' other hands ' were entrusted with it?'
He rose from the table, biting his cigar through.
' The blackmailer blackmailed,' he muttered. ' New sensational novel. Guess I'll think it over.'
He glanced again at the letter, and saw that he had till the evening of the next day in which to commit himself definitely to one or the other course of action. He would be back in London in the course of the next afternoon; there would be time then, and to-day he was really too busy to give the matter the attention which he was afraid it deserved. But by mid-day to-morrow the affair of the strike in any case would be off his mind; he would devote the whole of the hours occupied by his journey back to London, if necessary, to the consideration of this matter. Then there was the note from Amelie stopping the coal-boring… In a moment a possible reconstruction of what had happened suggested itself to him. She knew.
He went down to the scene of the strike that afternoon, and found things rather more serious than he had anticipated. The bricklayers had already gone out, the platelayers had sent in demands which he did not feel himself justified in accepting without consultation with Mr. Palmer, and, what was much more serious, in spite of their indentures, there was a hint of trouble with the signalmen. It took him, indeed, some two or three hours to find out the full extent of that with which the line was threatened, and in the back of his mind all the time was the consciousness of that with which he himself was threatened. He had, in
