A vague presentiment of horror crept into his thoughts. He was very quiet as they moved on mile after mile, and his thoughts were strangely blended. Past and present mingled with his teeming fancies. While he tried to think of Nina’s terrible grief and peril now, he found his thoughts wandering back to the child Nina who had been so fond of him in his boyish days, and the memory of her childish love smote him with bitter reproach. “From first to last she has been fond of me and true to me,” he said to himself. “And I, how have I deserved the gift of her heart and life? I have been a traitor to her trust, an incubus, a marplot. But for my mother’s mistaken kindness the child might have had a life all sunshine and beauty. She had wealth and honor and many friends. These would have made her life a dream of happiness but for me--me, who have blighted and ruined it all, who have darkened her young days with shame and sorrow, and perhaps a horrible doom. Oh, better for her had she never seen me!” Before his mind’s eye came a vision of Nina as he had seen her first on the day of his home coming to Selwyn Heights with his sore, rebellious heart. “What a grey day it was,--grey sky, grey sea, grey hills in the background. Nothing bright in all the picture except Nina in her crimson dress, and with her proud, lovely face, and great wistful dark eyes. Ah, it was a grey day for her, too, poor child. A black day--black with the shadow of creeping horror! Oh, God forgive me for the weakness and folly that wrought all her woe!” He felt like shrieking aloud as he saw in memory the lovely white figure that had come to him in the drawing room that night, and fancied that lissom bride-like figure upon the awful black scaffold. “They shall not murder her, my love, my bride,” he swore, frantically to himself. “I will snatch her from the arms of the law, aye, from the arms of death itself, or failing, I will die with her and beside her, and my death may be some atonement for my fault.” Oh, the sadness, the madness, of a love felt too late! Talbot Strangemore knew it all now as he journeyed mechanically on while that lovely, bride-like figure of Nina kept pace with his dreadful thoughts of her impending doom. “Do I hear her sing as of old, My bird with the shining head, My own dove with the tender eye? But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry, There is some one dying or dead. And a sudden thunder is rolled: For a tumult shakes the city And I wake, my dream is fled; In the shuddering dawn behold, Without knowledge, without pity By the curtains of my bed That abiding phantom cold.” Lost in his own thronging thoughts he has unconsciously lagged behind the others until the murmur of their voices falls but indistinctly on his ears.