She had been married to Gertstein for seven years. Two years before their marriage she had been introduced to Larry Hughes. She believed him then to be, as she had believed up to that day, a wealthy man about town, and nothing worse. She had been fascinated, infatuated, by him, and there had been an affair⁠—she insisted that it had been nothing but a sort of glorified flirtation, but, though Labar drew his own conclusions, in which love letters of the most ardent description had been exchanged. The episode drew to a close when he went abroad some eighteen months later. She had married Gertstein and she had seen no more of Hughes until it might have been eighteen months or two years ago, when she met him accidentally at a race meeting.

“Did you meet on the old footing?” asked Labar, bluntly.

“Oh, no, no,” she protested with some slight symptom of colour in her pale cheeks. “We were simply old friends.”

“And it was after this that the blackmail started?”