Smith's eye had already found me, where I leaned against the wall, my hands tied. "I see," he said coolly. "I knew before that the game was up; and I have been somewhere, and warned someone," he added, with a glance at Charnock, who nodded. "But I did not know how they had the office." "He gave it! That is how they had it!" Cassel retorted. "And it is my belief that like man like master! And that that poor piece there would no more have dared to inform without his patron's leave than----" He left the end of his sentence to be understood; but Charnock, taking up the tale and disregarding Ferguson's mutterings, described in a few words what had happened. When he came to the girl's intervention in my behalf, the woman who had entered with Smith, and who, though she seemed to be known to the conspirators--for her appearance caused no remark--had hitherto remained fidgetting in the background, moved forward into the room; and approaching the girl, who was sitting moodily at a table by the fire, touched her cheek with her fingers, and slipping her hand under her chin, turned up her face. To this the girl made no resistance, and the two women remained looking into one another's eyes for a long minute. Then the elder, who was the same woman I had seen with Smith at the great lady's house in the outskirts, let the girl's face drop again, with a little flirt of her fingers. "Doris and Strephon, I see?" she said with a sneer. CHAPTER XXIX What the girl answered I did not catch, for as she raised her head again to reply, my ear caught the sound of rising danger. Ferguson was speaking, his words, no longer coherent, a mere frothing of oaths and calling of hideous fates on his head if he had ever betrayed, if he had ever sold, if he had ever deceived, now ran in a steady current of wrathful denunciation. And the men listened; he had their ears again; he was no longer on his trial. Afterwards I learned that while my attention was astray with the women. Smith, by stating what I had stated to him--namely, that the Secretary had used Ferguson as the intermediary through whom to warn Berwick--had confirmed the plotter's story, and at a stroke had restored his position. Whereon, full of spite, and desperately certain that however exposed he lay on other sides I at any rate knew enough to hang him, the wretched man had set himself anew to compass my destruction. Deterred neither by the check he had received, nor by the gloomy looks of the conspirators, who responded but sluggishly to his appeal, he drove home again and again, and with wild words and wilder oaths, the one point on which he relied, the one point that was so dear to him that he could not understand their hesitation.