But no voices came from out the walls, the ticking of the clock had no sinister meaning. She heard the charwoman singing some common music-hall tune to herself as she swept. Swish, swish, went the irritating broom--then an organ began to play aggressively at the end of the street--a chorus from a comic opera she had heard one night, nestling against Victor in the dress circle of a suburban theatre. She shuddered and wrung her hands. Why was life so ghastly, so full of horror, of terror? But she must not stand there, letting the precious moments go idly, fruitlessly by. "I must have help," she told herself. "Alone, I can do nothing. I will write to Mr. Naz, and ask him to come and see me." Writing an ordinary little note, merely asking Paul conventionally if he could make it convenient to name some time to visit them, it would comfort her and Victor’s poor mother to see one who had been a good friend of their loved one’s--then going out to post it at the nearest pillar-box--restored her outward, if not her inward equanimity. She spent the day literally setting the house in order--assembling all Victor’s belongings in the attic lumber-room, to be thoroughly searched by her on the morrow. Early the following morning an empty hansom drove up, bearing a little note from Paul. Would twelve o’clock suit her to see him? And would she send an answer by the cab? She wrote a few lines in affirmative reply; then, after seeing her step-mother comfortably established on the sitting-room sofa where she and Victor had revelled in each other’s society that night of happiness after the performance--the night he first showed her his somewhat sudden passion for her in all its fulness--she stole away upstairs to the attic to put away the relics of the dead man. She had cleared her two best trunks; and in these she meant to store everything he had left--clothes, books, pipes. The money had been placed in a bank in her step-mother’s name. A lawyer friend of Doctor Thompson had acted for them, and had simplified everything. The little room was hot. She opened the window wide, drew down the tattered old green blind, and set to work shaking, folding, and arranging Victor’s clothes. How like him it was to have shirts that a French marquis would hardly have disdained! As she laid them away with as tender and reverent a touch as that of a bereaved mother storing away the little garments of a loved, lost infant, she almost broke down. But she took herself sternly to task, repressed her melting mood, and reminded herself that a strong man’s work--the bringing a criminal to book--was hers. Any and every womanish weakness must be sternly disallowed.