"Rotter, I think," said Mr. Burke, "was precisely the word _I_ used." And Bessie Lonsdale listened for the second time that day while two voices, now, instead of one, were lifted in excoriation of some woman who seemed to grow, as they talked, only a shade less real than herself. She had again the sensation of the words beating upon her like blows which she was powerless to resist. She lost, as one does in physical pain, all sense of time.... "However," Mr. Ford brought down his hand with a kind of judicial finality, "if Mrs. Lonsdale will come on down with us now--the storm seems to have slackened--we'll see what can be done." He turned in his chair as if he were preparing to rise. At the movement Bessie Lonsdale seemed to grow rigid in her chair. "Wait." Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned, startled by the strangeness of her tone. They waited for her to speak. "I can't go." "Can't go?" They echoed it together. "Why not?" "Because," said she, "I am the woman you have been talking about." For an instant they sat perfectly motionless, the three of them. Then slowly Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned their heads and looked at each other, as if to verify what they had heard. Mr. Burke put out his hand toward Bessie Lonsdale's arm, resting on the table, and he spoke very gently indeed: "My dear Mrs. Lonsdale, this is impossible." "Impossible," she said, passing her hand across her eyes, "impossible?" "Yes, Mrs. Lonsdale." He spoke reasonably, as if she were a child. "It couldn't be you." He turned now to include Mr. Ford, who sat staring at them both. "I myself gave Mrs. Lonsdale the news of Mr. Ayling's death, over the telephone. She was at her home, in Cambridge Terrace, quietly having tea with a friend; the friend was still there when I arrived. You have been at home, in London, all day." "No," she said. "No, Mr. Burke." "I think," said Mr. Ford, also very gently indeed, "that perhaps Mrs. Lonsdale is trying to shield some one." Until that instant Bessie Lonsdale had no plan. She had only known that she could not go with them to Homebury St. Mary, there to be recognized. But something in the suggestion of Mr. Ford--in the tone, perhaps, more than the words--caused her to say, looking from one to the other of these two men so lately strangers to her: "I wonder--I wonder if I could make you understand!" They begged her to believe that that was the thing they wished most to do. "I did it"--she paused, and forced herself to go on--"because of my daughter." Intent upon her truth, she did not even see by the shocked expression of their faces the awfulness of the thing they thought she confessed, and the obviousness of the reason to which their minds had leaped. Mr. Burke put out his hand again and laid it upon her arm, which trembled slightly at his touch. "Mrs. Lonsdale," he said, and this time he spoke even more gently, but more urgently, than before, "are you _sure_ you wish to tell?"