Clifford did not immediately answer. He saw that he was upon the threshold of a mystery, to which the staring eyes and trembling limbs of the unhappy old man before him seemed already to give him the clue. Without waiting for Clifford’s answer to her question, Miss Theodora suddenly went on again: “You said you had just left Nell, Mr. King. Where was that?” He hesitated. He was overwhelmed with a feeling of pity for these two forlorn people, shut up and barricaded within their poor tumbledown house. So that, although he certainly had a vague belief that the old Colonel was in some unknown way involved in the crimes which had made so great a stir, yet he longed for his escape as much, or almost as much, as he longed for Nell’s. So he answered in a troubled voice: “I left her--in the hands of the police.” There was the warning, if the Colonel needed it. The old man shook so much, as he heard the announcement, that Clifford began to fear the “stroke” which the police-sergeant had predicted. Miss Theodora turned pale, and clasped her hands. “The police!” she exclaimed, as if scarcely able to grasp the dreadful fact. And she twirled round, as if moved by a spring, to her father: “Papa!” she almost screamed, “if the police have arrested Nell, I shall be called to give evidence against her! I will never do it--never! I would die first!” Clifford was touched. It was only of Nell the poor little lady thought. Then surely Miss Theodora could not have the slightest suspicion that her own father had anything to do with the crimes! The Colonel, meanwhile, had recovered much of his self-possession. “Calm yourself, my dear,” he said to his daughter, but in such a hard tone of despair that Clifford began to feel that he was an intruder upon grief so deep. “If Nell is arrested--” He stopped. For in the middle of his speech there was a knock at the front door. Miss Theodora, Clifford noticed, drew herself up in an attitude of rigid attention. There was dead silence in the little dining-room, until the knock was repeated louder than before. “I shall go upstairs,” said Miss Theodora, softly, “and see from the window who it is. But if it is the police, come for my evidence, I will be put in prison rather than give it.” She had scarcely uttered the words when a third knock was heard at the front door. Miss Bostal glided out of the room and ran upstairs without another word. Then again there was a pause. The two men looked at each other by the light of the lamp, which gave but a dim illumination through its smoky glass. In the old Colonel’s face Clifford became conscious that there was written a most pitiful history, the history of a life-long shame, of an indelible disgrace. Still only groping towards the truth as he was, the young man stood silent, reverent, wondering what awful thing he was next to learn.