Hope had arisen in Clare's heart. Might not all her fear be unfounded, all her sufferings vain? What if the coat had not been purchased by Paul Ward at all? She tried to remember exactly what he had said in the few jesting words that had passed on the subject. Had he said he had bought it at Amherst, or only that it had been made at Amherst? By an intense effort, so distracting and painful that it made her head ache with a sharp pain, she endeavoured to force her memory to reproduce what had passed, but in vain; she remembered only the circumstance, the fatal identification of the coat. "Artists and writers," her uncle had said, in his disdainful classification, occasionally made certain odd arrangements concerning their garments unknown to the upper classes, to whom tailors and valets appertain of right; and Paul Ward was both a writer and an artist. Might he not have bought the coat from an acquaintance? Men of his class, she knew, often had queer acquaintances. The possession was one of the drawbacks of the otherwise glorious career of art and literature--people who might require to sell their coats, and be equal to doing it. Yes there was a hope, a possibility that it might be so, and the girl seized on it with avidity. But, in a moment, the terrible recollection struck her that she was considering the matter at the wrong end. Who had bought the coat made by Evans of Amherst, and what had been its intermediate history, were things of no import. The question was, in whose possession was it when the unknown man was murdered. Had Paul Ward dined with him at the Strand Tavern? Was Paul Ward the man whom the waiter could undertake to identify, in London? If so--and the terrible pang of the conviction that so, indeed, it was, returned to her with redoubled force from the momentary relief of the doubt--the danger was in London, not there at Amherst; from the waiter, not from Evans. Distracted between the horror, overwhelming to the innocent mind of the young girl, to whom sin and crime had been hitherto dim and distant phantoms, of such guilt attaching itself to the image which she had set up for the romantic worship of her girlish heart, and the urgent terrified desire which she felt that, however guilty, he might escape--nay, the more firmly she felt convinced that he _must_ be guilty, the more ardently she desired it,--Clare Carruthers's gentle breast was rent with such unendurable torture as hardly any after happiness could compensate for or efface. All this time Mr. Carruthers was reading the newspaper, and at length he laid it down, and was about to address Clare, when the footman entered the room, and informed him that Mr. Evans, the tailor, from Amherst, wished to be permitted to speak to him as soon as convenient. With much more alacrity than he usually displayed, Mr. Carruthers desired that Evans should be shown into the library, and declared his intention of going to speak to him immediately.