Elinor lay there with her eyes closed and a rigid, stricken look on her white face, a picture of hopeless despair. But Wulfrey's quick glance had caught the flutter of her heavy lids, and the gleam of terrified enquiry that had shot through them, as they came into the room, and he understood. He bent over her and whispered, "I have made it all right, Elinor. You need have no further fears----" "They will not hang me?" she whispered, and looked up into his face with all the terrors of the night still in her woful eyes. "No one will know anything about it unless you tell them yourself. You will eat something now, and then you had better lie still. Get some sleep if you can or you will make yourself ill. If you fell ill you might say things you should not, you know." She struggled up on to one elbow. "You are quite sure they will not hang me?" she whispered again. "Quite sure, unless you are so foolish as to tell them all about it." "I have felt the rope round my neck all night. Oh, it was terrible in the dark. It was terrible ... terrible----" and she felt about her pretty white neck with her trembling hands. "Forget all about it now. I have made all the necessary arrangements. There will have to be an inquest. It will be held here---" "Here?" she shivered. "At ten o'clock this morning. You are too ill to be present, so you will just lie still. It will not take long. And I have done everything else that had to be done." "It is very good of you," she murmured, with a forlorn shake of the head. She did not ask by what means he had saved her from the consequences of what she had done. Perhaps she dared not. Perhaps she believed he had, after all, forsworn himself for her sake, and refrained from questioning him lest it should only add to his discomfort. Anyway she was satisfied with the fact. She was not going to be hanged. That was enough. Mollie came in with her deftly-compounded cup. "Drink it up," said the Doctor. "I will look in again later on," and he went away to prepare the household for the coming meeting in the big dining-room. IX The sixteen jurymen, whom Wulfrey had summoned in order to make quite sure of a legal panel, came riding up in ones and twos, with faces tuned to the occasion, disguising, as well as they could, the vast curiosity this sudden call had excited in themselves and all their various households.