“Help! Help! Seize him. He is a murderer—a murderer!—Help! Help! Seize the murderer!” For one moment all sense of perception seemed to have left Gray, so thoroughly unexpected was such an act on the part of Ada, and it was well for him that those who were around for about the same space of time remained in a similar undecided and bewildered state, as people do always on any very sudden occasion for instant action. Ada stood pointing with one trembling finger at Gray, while her pale face and long black hair, combined with her rare beauty, made her look like one inspired. “The murderer!” she again cried, and her voice seemed to break the spell which kept both Gray and the chance passengers paralysed. With a cry of terror, Jacob Gray turned and fled towards Charing-cross. Ada’s feelings had been wrought up to too high a pitch of excitement. She had felt it to be her duty to denounce the murderer, and while that duty remained to be done, the consciousness that upon her it devolved, had nerved her to the task, and supported her hitherto—now, however, the words were spoken. At what she supposed the risk of her life, she had announced the crime of Jacob Gray. The revulsion of feeling was too much, and a bystander, who saw her stagger, was just in time to catch her as she fainted, and would otherwise have fallen to the ground. The two persons who had been talking and laughing together at the moment of Ada’s first exclamation, did not seem disposed to let the accused man get off so easily as he appeared upon the point of doing. They raised the cry so awful in the ear of a fugitive through the streets of London, “Stop him! Stop him!” And they both started after Jacob Gray at full speed. Had Gray, when he turned the corner of Northumberland-house, then walked quietly, like an ordinary passenger, the chances were that he would have escaped; but, in his terror, he flew rather than ran up the Strand, at once pointing himself out to all as the one pursued, and tempting every person who had time or inclination to join the exciting chase. The words, “Stop him!” sounded in his ears, and he bounded forward as he heard them, with another cry and a speed that, while it made it very hazardous for every one to oppose him, yet increased the ardour of the pursuit. In the course of a few seconds, fifty persons had joined the chase, and yells and shouts came upon Gray’s affrighted ears. With compressed lips and a face as livid as that of a corpse, he rushed on without the smallest idea of where he was going. “For my life—for my life,” he gasped, and each cry behind him affected him like a shock of electricity, and caused him to give another bound forward in all the wildness of despair.