"Lady Alice, pray do not build too much on what I am going to say. If Francis Trent and John Smith be the same, then my knowledge of John Smith's previous condition leads me to think it quite possible that it was Francis Trent who, in a fit of frenzy, committed the murder of which your husband is suspected." Lady Alice looked at him in silence. "I don't see exactly," she said, "that I should be of much use." "Nor I--exactly," said Maurice. "But I see a vague chance; and I ask you--for your husband's sake--to try it." "Ah, you know I cannot refuse that," she said quickly. And then she arranged with him where they should meet on the following afternoon in order to drive to the lodgings now occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Francis Trent. Whether this proceeding might not be stigmatized as "tampering with witnesses," Maurice and Lady Alice neither knew nor cared. If Maurice had a doubt, he stifled it by telling himself that they were not going to visit the "witness," Mary Trent, but the sick man, John Smith, in whom Lady Alice had been interested at the hospital. It was only as a precaution that he took with him young Mr. Grierson, junior partner of the firm of solicitors to whom Caspar's defence was entrusted. Young Grierson was a friend as well as a lawyer, and it was always as well to have a friend at hand. But really he hardly knew for what result he hoped. The rooms in which Maurice himself, at Ethel's instance, had located Mr. and Mrs. Francis Trent were in Bernard Street. They were plain but apparently clean and comfortable. Maurice said a word to the servant, and unceremoniously put her aside, and walked straight into the room where he knew that Francis Trent was lying. A thin, spare woman, with a deadly pale face and black sunken eyes, rose from a seat beside the bed as they entered. Lady Alice knew, as if by instinct, that this was Mary Trent. She averted her eyes from the woman who had falsely accused her husband: she could not bear to look at her. But Mary Trent scarcely took her eyes off Lady Alice's face. "Will you look here, Lady Alice, if you please?" said Maurice in his most professional tone. She turned towards the bed, and saw--yes, it was the face of the man whom she had known in the hospital: thinner, yellower, more haggard than ever, but still the face of the patient who used to watch her as if her presence were a means of healing in itself. "Yes," she said slowly, "that is--John Smith." "His real name is Francis Trent," said Maurice. "Do you know this lady, Francis?" The sick man nodded. There was a curiously vacant look upon his face, brightened only at times by gleams of vivid consciousness. "Yes, yes, I know her. The lady that came to see me in hospital," he murmured feebly. "Do you know who she is?" "Why do you trouble him, sir?" said Mrs. Trent. "You see how ill he is, wouldn't it be better for him to be left in peace?"