After Ralston had finished telling his story, Russell Vanbrugh, who was an eminent criminal lawyer, had commented to her upon the adventure, telling her how men had been hanged upon just such circumstantial evidence, when it had not chanced that such a man as Doctor Routh, at the head of his profession and above all possible suspicion, had intervened in time. She tried to argue that she might be pardoned for being misled, as she had been. But her conscience told her flatly that she was deceiving herself, that she had really known far less than most of the others about the events of the previous day, some of which were now altogether new to her, that she had judged John in the worst light from the first words she had heard about him at the Assembly ball, and had not even been at pains to examine the circumstances so far as she might have known them. And she remembered how, but a short time previous to the present moment, she had looked at the sealed envelope with disgust--almost with loathing, and had turned over its ashes with the tongs. Yet that letter had cost him a supreme effort of strength and will, made for her sake, when he was bruised and wounded and exhausted with fatigue. “Jack,” she said at last, turning to him again, “I must talk to you. Please come to me right after dinner--when you come back with the men--will you?” “Certainly,” answered John. He knew that an explanation was inevitable. Oddly enough, though he now had by far the best of the situation, he did not wish that the explanatory interview might come so soon. Perhaps he did not wish for it at all. With Katharine love was alive again, working and suffering. With him there was no response, where love had been. In its place there was an unformulated longing to be left alone for a time, not to be forced to realize how utterly he had been distrusted and abandoned when he had most needed faith and support. There was an unwilling and unjust comparison of Katharine with his mother, too, which presented itself constantly. Losing the sense of values and forgetting how his mother had denied his word of honour, he remembered only that her disbelief had lasted but an hour, and that hour seemed now but an insignificant moment. She had done so much, too, and at once. He recalled, amid the noise and laughter, the clinking of the things on the little tray she had brought up for him and set down outside his door--a foolish detail, but one of those which strike fast little roots as soon as the seed has fallen. The reaction, too, after all he had gone through, was coming at last and was telling even on his wiry organization. Most men would have broken down already. He wished that he might be spared the necessity of Katharine’s explanation--that she would write to him, and that he might read in peace and ponder at his leisure--and answer at his discretion. Yet he knew very well that the situation must be cleared up at once. He