All the facts of the case, which with infinite difficulty she had been able to drag out of John, were now more or less clear. They were marshaled in definite order, they fell into a logical scheme. It now remained for her to act without an instant’s delay upon the data she had so painfully gathered. And yet to move at all in such a matter called for rare courage, high devotion. At his wife’s entreaty, Endor went down to the House of Commons as soon as luncheon was over. Her clear good sense, upon which he now leaned heavily, saw that for him in so terrible a crisis the paramount need was to keep at work. She divined that the only chance he had of holding on to the will was to occupy himself as much as possible. In such a crisis any form of brooding or inaction would be fatal. For her, anything of that kind would be fatal, too. She must not look before or after. It was like crossing an abyss on a narrow plank. Her resolve taken, her plan formed, one pang of indecision might paralyze a nerve upon which all chance of safety depended. And she must act without an instant’s delay. She listened for the click of the front door. And then from the discreet ambush of the charming new curtains of that singularly pleasant room, in which so lately as two days ago, each individual object had been a thing of delight, she watched her husband’s tall and picturesque figure disappear round the corner of the Square into the Brompton Road. Then she went to the telephone at once and rang up Freeman’s Hotel. It seemed an age before her demand to speak with Mr. Hierons could be met. A voice was not sure whether Mr. Hierons was now staying at the hotel, but it would find out. He had been away some days and the voice rather fancied that he had not yet returned. Minutes passed. And then in the midst of a baffled impotence that was almost a fever now, to Helen’s unspeakable relief, a tone she faintly recognized said, “Are you there?” George Hierons was speaking. If Mrs. Endor cared to come round at once to the hotel he would be glad to wait in for her. L On the way to Freeman’s Hotel in a taxi, Helen did her best to remember that she still lived and moved and had her being in twentieth century London. She tried hard to keep all the simple and familiar realities before her mind. Everything looked so oddly different now from what it had done less than three hours ago when she had driven west from St. Pancras station, that such a ritual seemed necessary. She was plunged in a state of affairs whose fantastic horror it was hardly possible for a mind so sane as hers to exaggerate. It was like living in a nightmare, except that it was much more vivid. But when everything around, the rattle of the taxi, the London mud, the raw air, had convinced her that she was truly awake, she might have bartered her immortal soul to believe otherwise.