The odd thing about it is that I found a very friendly invitation from Van Torp himself, begging Mr.
Feist to go down to Derbyshire and stop a week with him.' Margaret leaned back in her chair and looked at her guest in quiet surprise.
'What does that mean ?' she asked.

'Is it possible that Mr.Van Torp has got up this campaign against himself in order to play some trick on the Stock Exchange ?' Logotheti smiled and shook his head.
'That's not the way such things are usually managed,' he answered.

'A hundred years ago a publisher paid a critic to attack a book in order to make it succeed, but in finance abuse doesn't contribute to our success, which is always a question of credit.

All these scurrilous articles have set the public very much against Van Torp, from Paris to San Francisco, and this man Feist is responsible for them.

He is either insane, or he has some grudge against Van Torp, or else he has been somebody's instrument, which looks the most probable.' 'What did you find amongst his papers ?' Margaret asked, quite forgetting her vicarious scruples about reading a sick man's letters.
'A complete set of the articles that have appeared, all neatly filed, and a great many notes for more, besides a lot of stuff written in cypher.