But he confessed everything else, how he had been madly in love with the poor girl when he was her father's secretary, and how she treated him like a servant and made her father turn him out, and how he hated Van Torp furiously for being engaged to marry her.

He hated the Nickel Trust, too, because he had thought the shares were going down and had risked the little he had as margin on a drop, and had lost it all by the unexpected rise.

He drank harder after that, till he was getting silly from it, when the girl's death gave him his chance against Van Torp, and he manufactured the evidence in the diary he kept, and went to Bamberger with it and made the poor man believe whatever he invented.
He told me all that, with a lot of details, but I could not make him admit that he had killed the girl himself, so I gave him his opium and he went to sleep.

That's my story.

Or rather, it's his, as I got it from him last Thursday.