She snatched up the paper again: "Who has been for some months on a prolonged vacation"--the phrase stared sardonically at her. That might carry far back--she said it under her breath, fearfully--beyond the murder of Doctor Moreau! Her face burned, and her breath came sharp and fast. Why, when she brought her warning to the cabin, had Hugh been so anxious to get her away, unless to prevent her sight of the man who was there--to whom he had taken her horse? Who was there in Smoky Mountain whom he would protect at hazard of his own life? Yet in this crisis, even, her appeal to his love had been fruitless. He had called Harry Sanderson his closest friend, had said that in his place Harry would do the same. She remembered his cry: "What you ask is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward!" She had asked only that he tell the truth. To protect a vulgar murderer was not courageous. But what if they were bound by ties of old friendship and college _camaraderie_? Men had their standards. Jessica's veins were all afire. A rector-murderer? A double career? Was it beyond possibility? At the sanatorium she had re-read _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_; now she thought of John Jasper, the choir-master, stealing away from the cathedral to the London opium den to plan the murder of his nephew. The mad thought gripped her imagination. Harry Sanderson had been wild and lawless in his university days, a gamester, a skeptic--the Abbot of the Saints! To her his pretensions had never seemed more than a graceful sham, the generalities of religion he spread for the delectation of fashionable St. James only "as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." He had been a hard drinker in those days. What if the old desire had run on beneath the fair exterior, denied and repressed till it had burst control--till he had fled from those who knew him, to Hugh, in whose loyalty he trusted, to give it rein in a debauch? Say that this had happened, and that in the midst of it Moreau, whom he had known in Aniston, had come upon him. Anticipating recognition, to cover his own shame and save his career, in drunken frenzy perhaps, he might have fired the shot on the hillside--that Moreau, taken unawares, had thought was Hugh's! It came to her like an impinging ray of light--the old curious likeness that had sometimes been made a jest of at the white house in the aspens. Moreau and Prendergast had believed it to be Hugh! So had the town, for the body had been found on his ground! But on the night when the real murderer came again to the cabin--perhaps it was his coming that had brought back the lost memory!--Hugh had known the truth. In the light of this supposition his strained manner then, his present determination not to speak, all stood plain.