"I will take great care, Sylvia. Be sure of that," he answered. "Now that I have you, I will take great care," and leaning toward her, as she sat with her hands clasped upon her knees, he touched her hair with his lips very tenderly. "Oh, Hilary, what will I do? Till you come back to me! What will I do?" "I have thought of it, Sylvia. I thought this. It might be better if, for these months--they will not pass quickly, my dear, either for you or me. They will be long slow months for both of us. That's the truth, my dear. But since they must be got through, I thought it might be better if you went back to your mother." Sylvia shook her head. "It would be better," he urged, with a look toward the house. "I can't do that. Afterward, in a year's time--when we are together, I should like very much for us both to go to her. But my mother forbade it when I went away from Chamonix. I was not to come whining back to her, those were her words. We parted altogether that night." She spoke with an extreme simplicity. There was neither an appeal for pity nor a hint of any bitterness in her voice. But the words moved Chayne all the more on that account. He would be leaving a very lonely, friendless girl to battle through the months of his absence by herself; and to battle with what? He was not sure. But he had not taken so lightly the shadow on the ceiling and the opening door. "If only you had come with me on that first day," he cried. "I will have to-night to look back upon, my dear," she said. "That will be something. Oh, if I had not asked you to come back! If you had gone away and said nothing! What would I have done then? As it is, I will know that you are thinking of me--" and suddenly she turned to him, and held him away from her in a spasm of fear while her eyes searched his face. But in a moment they melted and a smile made her lips beautiful. "Oh, yes, I can trust you," she said, and she nestled against him contentedly like a child. For a little while they sat thus, and then her eyes sought the garden and the house at her feet. It seemed that the sinister plot was not, after all, to develop in that place of quiet and old peace without her for its witness. It seemed that she was to be kept by some fatality close-fettered to the task, the hopeless task, which she would now gladly have foregone. And she wondered whether, after all, she was in some way meant to watch the plot, perhaps, after all, to hinder it. "Hilary," she said, "you remember that evening at the Chalet de Lognan?" "Do I remember it?" "You explained to me a law--that those who know must use their knowledge, if by using it they can save a soul, or save a life." "Yes," he said, vaguely remembering that he had spoken in this strain.