She raised the picture to her lips and kissed it--not with passion--but clingingly, as though it represented her only wealth, amid so much poverty. Then her hand, holding it, dropped to her knee again; the other hand came to close over it; and her eyes shut. Tears came slowly through the lashes. Amazing!--that that woman should have come back--and died--within a few hundred yards, and she, Alice, know nothing! In spite of all Richard's persuasions she tortured herself anew with the thought of the interview between Judith and Mr. Barron. What could they have talked about--so long? Judith was always an excitable, hot-tempered creature. Her silence had been heavily and efficiently bought for fifteen years. Then steps had been taken--insisted upon--by Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton. His wife and his sister-in-law had opposed him in vain. And Ralph had after all triumphed in Judith's apparent acquiescence. Supposing she had now come home, perhaps on a sudden impulse, with a view to further blackmail, would not her wisest move be to risk some indiscretion, some partial disclosure, so that her renewed silence afterward might have the higher price? An hour's _tete-a-tete_ with that shrewd, hard-souled man, Henry Barron! Alice Puttenham guessed that her own long-established dislike of him as acquaintance and neighbour was probably returned with interest; that he classed her now as one of "Meynell's lot," and would be only too glad to find himself possessed of any secret information that might, through her, annoy and harass Richard Meynell, her friend and counsellor. Was it conceivable that nothing should have been said in that lengthy interview as to the causes for Judith's coming home?--or of the reasons for her original departure? What else could have accounted for so prolonged a conversation between two persons, so different in social grade, and absolute strangers to each other? Richard had told her, indeed, and she saw from the _Post_, that at the inquest Barron had apparently accounted for the conversation. "She gave me a curious history of her life in the States. I was interested by her strange personality--and touched by her physical condition." Richard was convinced that there was no reasonable cause for alarm. But Richard was always the consoler--the optimist--where she was concerned. Could she have lived at all--if it had not been so? And then, for the second time, the rush of feeling rose, welling up, not from the springs of the past, but from the deepest sources of the present. _Richard!_