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Updated: October 22, 2025
Why the devil do you think I wrote those letters?" Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face. "Because I wrote 'Hester Macklin's' to myself!" Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. "Well ?" he finally said, in a low tone.
We'll dine here and as late as you like." Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the shabbiness of his daily wear. He looked paler and more shyly truculent than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid stature, said to himself, with the sudden professional instinct for "type": "He might be an agent of something a chap who carries deadly secrets."
Vyse's notorious lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton's imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself. He would keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications that the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his books were already catalogued.
Betton seemed for an instant to share his secretary's embarrassment; then he burst into an uproarious laugh. "Hoax, was it? That's rough on you, old fellow!" Vyse shrugged his shoulders. "Yes; but the interesting question is why on earth didn't your answer come back, too?" "My answer?" "The official one the one I wrote in your name. If she's unknown, what's become of that?"
Betton, furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were missing one couldn't tell, with the company Vyse kept! and then dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in doing so. He felt himself exonerated by Vyse's conduct. The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the door to announce "Mr.
"No, I haven't," said Vyse; "but it will be awfully jolly finding out." There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton's part, sardonically calm on his visitor's. "You you've given up writing altogether?" Betton continued. "Yes; we've changed places, as it were." Vyse paused. "But about these letters you dictate the answers?" "Lord, no!
"If I tell him I've no use for him now, he'll see straight through it, of course; and then, hang it, he looks so poor!" This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan of action that was beginning to take shape in his mind.
He posted the letter to the misunderstood party the letter from you that the Dead Letter Office didn't return. I posted my own letter to her; and that came back." A measurable silence followed the emission of this ingenious conjecture; then Betton observed with gentle irony: "Extremely neat.
He had not seen the name in years what on earth could Duncan Vyse have to say? He ran over the page and dropped it with a wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett, re-entering, met by a tentative "Yes, sir?" "Nothing. Yes that is " Betton picked up the note. "There's a gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten." Strett glanced at the clock. "Yes, sir.
Vyse," and Betton, a moment later, crossed the threshold of his pleasant library. His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence. Only he had grown shabbier, and bald. Betton held out a hospitable hand. "This is a good surprise!
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