As for help, there was none: the nurse was gone on some errand; the doctor was arranging for the funeral of Oxbye under the name of Lord Harry Norland; the cottage was empty. Such a fainting fit does not last for ever. Iris came round, and sat up, looking wildly around. "What is it?" she cried. "What does it mean?" "It means, my love, that you have returned to your husband." He laid an arm round her, and kissed her again and again. "You are my Harry!--living!--my own Harry?" "Your own Harry, my darling. What else should I be?" "Tell me then, what does it mean--that picture--that horrid photograph?" "That means nothing--nothing--a freak--a joke of the doctor's. What could it mean?" He took it up. "Why, my dear, I am living--living and well. What should this mean but a joke?" He laid it on the table again, face downwards. But her eyes showed that she was not satisfied. Men do not make jokes on death; it is a sorry jest indeed to dress up a man in grave-clothes, and make a photograph of him as of one dead. "But you--you, my Iris; you are here--tell me how and why--and when, and everything? Never mind that stupid picture: tell me." "I got your letter, Harry," she replied. "My letter?" he repeated. "Oh! my dear, you got my letter, and you saw that your husband loved you still." "I could not keep away from you, Harry, whatever had happened. I stayed as long as I could. I thought about you day and night. And at last I--I--I came back. Are you angry with me, Harry?" "Angry? Good God! my dearest, angry?" He kissed her passionately--not the less passionately that she had returned at a time so terrible. What was he to say to her? How was he to tell her? While he showered kisses on her he was asking himself these questions. When she found out--when he should confess to her the whole truth--she would leave him again. Yet he did not understand the nature of the woman who loves. He held her in his arms; his kisses pleaded for him; they mastered her--she was ready to believe, to accept, to surrender even her truth and honesty; and she was ready, though she knew it not, to become the accomplice of a crime. Rather than leave her husband again, she would do everything. Yet, Lord Harry felt there was one reservation: he might confess everything, except the murder of the Dane. No word of confession had passed the doctor's lips, yet he knew too well that the man had been murdered; and, so far as the man had been chosen for his resemblance to himself, that was perfectly useless, because the resemblance, though striking at the first, had been gradually disappearing as the man Oxbye grew better; and was now, as we have seen, wholly lost after death. "I have a great deal--a great deal--to tell you, dear," said the husband, holding both her hands tenderly. "You will have to be very patient with me. You must make up your mind to be shocked at first, though I shall be able to convince you that there was really nothing else to be done--nothing else at all."