Yet—how to stay? She shuddered. No, to stay was impossible. But she must safeguard Brand as far as possible. There was no one she could take into her confidence, no one to help her. And again there was so much to do, so little time to do it in! Evelyn knew something of official methods in dealing with secret agents; the country which had benefited by Brand’s betrayal of the negotiations would be the last to help him. Yet he must be got away at once, to another country under another name. He was staying at Seaford; from there it would be easy to get to Newhaven; if she wrote at once, he would get her letter by the second post at latest, he could in all probability take the morning boat to Dieppe, and from thence journey inland. There was a little village she knew of, a few miles from Paris, where he would be secure until he had arranged his plans. Or he could ship straight to Marseilles; there were no towns more easy to be lost in than Marseilles and Barcelona, hotbeds of cosmopolitan intrigue. Her brain cleared. She would arrange to meet Brand at Marseilles, to give him the money which she dared not trust by post. A cheque was, of course, too dangerous to be thought of for a moment; notes even might be traced, so could money orders and drafts upon foreign banks. It would take an hour or two at least to change so large a sum of money into the English gold which alone was secure. So much for the practical side; what of the human? How could she go back to her old life now, when the new life had been within her very grasp? Hourly to spend oneself for others, to wake in the morning with no thought but how best to equip relations and friends with armour to shield them from the world’s slings and arrows, to be a sort of model housekeeper with no wages, is doubtless excellent and useful, but it is not life. She went into the little sitting-room and stood where she had stood a few hours before, her lover’s arms about her, his kiss on her hair. It was the hour of her life, all she would ever have. Other people talked of love; she knew what it was. There was a difference. She had always known it in her heart; known what it might be to surrender herself utterly, in the way which most human beings cannot realize, bending will and mind and heart in joyous service, one with her husband, as Lady Wereminster had meant when she said that only in the later days of marriage was its summit reached—because to the right man and the right woman custom only deepens the tenderness of first tremulous ties and changes their promise to fulfilment.