The young man passed him, and going to the couch, looked down upon the solemn face of the dead man. He laid his hand almost tenderly upon his brow--he listened to the heart. "Take the old lady away, please!" he said, peremptorily, to Vera. Then, after the girl had, with some difficulty, coaxed her step-mother out, he turned to the scared and guiltless John Dobbs. "How did this happen?" he sternly inquired. CHAPTER XXI After that spontaneous, passionate prayer to Heaven for mercy, Joan seemed to awaken to a stronger, intenser life. A new instinct burst into a fierce clamouring within her--the primary instinct to live--live--anywhere, anyhow, at any price--but to live! "I ought not to die--I did not mean to kill him!" she wailed. Her first mad notion was to confess everything from first to last. There would be an inquest. If she were to go to the coroner and tell him the whole story, would he not see justice done? "But it would only be my bare word," she thought, as she sat on the edge of the bed, wringing her cold hands, shuddering so that her teeth chattered. "Any one who wanted to kill some one that stood in their way might do it, and say it was an accident!" No; that Quixotic idea was untenable. Dead silence--absolute secrecy--these must be her defensive armour. No one knew she had seen Victor Mercier since his re-appearance in London, and only two persons were aware of the so-called "love-affair." One was the school-girl go-between, Jenny Marchant, who on the only occasion they had happened to meet, at a charity bazaar, had taken her aside and implored her never to betray her complicity in that terrible escapade--she had read of Victor Mercier’s defalcations in the papers, but had not the remotest idea the consequence of her folly was that her chum Joan had bound herself to the "dreadful creature" by a marriage at the registrar’s. She would never say anything! "And Nana would rather die than betray me!" thought Joan. No--absolute secrecy--to act as if no such person as the dead man who had come by his death through her daring to drug him, existed, as far as she was concerned--that was the best, the only course open to her to save herself. "But--but--I must not do anything wild," she told herself. "The plan to marry my beloved and start in his yacht must not be carried out! That would never do! Would not people suspect I had some very good reason for flight--for hiding myself?" Then the truth suddenly flashed upon her; there was now no necessity for concealment! The man who had bound her to him in law was dead. "I am a widow!" she murmured, shivering. "How impossible--extraordinary--yet, yet--literally true! I never was his wife--except for a quarter of an hour in the registry office--what a mockery! And all this--horror--my misery--his wretched, sudden death--came out of that--those few words of an ordinary man’s--the signing of our names in a book!"