Mr. Harvey examined the contents of the pan carefully, tried some on his finger, and shook his cautious head. "I cannot be very positive," he replied at length, "but at least it can have no business in the gruel. Give me white paper and I will take some home and test it when it is dry." Lylie helped him scrape the sediment into a sheet of paper, and he folded it up and pocketed it. He then gave instructions to the two women to heat more water for fomentations while he returned to the sick room. Finding the Squire still comatose, he sat with his fingers on the intermittent pulse. Meanwhile Sophie, in whom fear, the most sickening of all emotions had awakened, crept downstairs, holding her breath past her father's room, down to the kitchen. Lylie happened to be in the scullery at the moment, Hester, still weak from morbid excitement as well as illness, was seated in a shadowy corner of the kitchen. Sophie crept in, looked fearfully round her, listened, and then began to stuff some papers into the grate. She thrust them into the heart of the flames and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Now I am more easy, thank God," she murmured, and slipped out of the kitchen as cautiously as she had come. Lylie, from behind the crack of the scullery door, went towards the grate, where she was joined by Hester. . . . A little later all was noise again, the Squire had been seized with violent spasms, raving and hiccuping like a madman, unable to swallow as much as a sip of water. Towards the small hours he grew delirious, then sank gradually; with the dawn he died. Sophie sat rigid in her room, paler than the paling day. She looked back over the past, recalling little speeches of Crandon's which, had she been less simple, less adoring, must have warned her of his plan. She saw the skill with which he had trapped her, she saw what he hoped to gain, she saw how he would lose nothing. It was she who had to pay. At the thought fear, natural, human fear, caught at her again and she sprang to her feet, a thing distraught. Escape--she must escape, get away from this dread that was closing in on her. She tied on cloak and hood and feverishly crammed all the money that for months she had been saving against her marriage into a little bag. On the stairs she ran into James Ruffiniac, and with her hands on his coat, pressing, begging, silent suppliants, she made him come into the dining-room. "James," she said, "do you want to make your fortune? You do, do you not? If you will come with me, it is made." "What do you want me to do?" asked James. "Only to hire a postchaise to go to London, and I'll give you fifteen guineas now, and more when we come there. Only to do that. And in London you would make your fortune." "Not on my life," he told her. "What you'm done you must see the end of. 'Tes your guilty soul makes you flee. I'll have to tell of this."