These winter months proved the most irksome of my captivity, my sole occupation being the plaiting of ropes from the flax which was grown about these parts. At this tedious and mechanic labour I toiled for many hours a day, in an exceeding great vacancy of spirit, until I hit upon a plan by which I might exercise my mind without hindering the work of my fingers. 'Twas my terror lest my wits should wither for lack of use that first set me on the device; since, indeed, it mattered little how or when Countess Ilga discovered that I had slain her husband. She _had_ discovered it; that was the kernel of the matter, and the searching out of the means whereby she gained the knowledge no more than an idle cracking of the shell into little fragments after the kernel has been removed. Many incidents, of course, became intelligible to me now that I knew whose portrait the miniature box contained. The sudden swoon of Lady Tracy in the hall at Pall Mall was now easily accounted for. The moment before I had been speaking of the miniature, and Lady Tracy knew--what I could not know--that Ilga held a proof of her acquaintanceship with the Count, and would be certain to attribute it as the cause of his death. It was doubtless, also, that piece of knowledge which drove her to such a pitch of fear that on seeing the Countess at Bristol she disclosed the story to her brother and besought his protection. I understood, moreover, the drift of the words which Marston was uttering when death took him. He meant to ask a question, not to make an explanation. Concerning those events, however, which more nearly concerned myself I was not so clear. I had no clue whereby I could ascertain how the Countess first came to fix her suspicions upon me, and in the absence of that, my speculations were the merest conjectures. Much of course was significant to me which I had disregarded, as, for instance, the journey of Countess Lukstein to Bristol, the diagram which she had drawn on the gravel under the piazza of Covent Garden, the perplexity with which she had regarded the diagram, and the sudden start she had given when I mentioned the date of my departure from Leyden. For I remembered that she had previously remarked the Horace when she came to visit me; and in that volume the date "September 14, 1685," was inscribed on the page opposite to Julian's outline of Lukstein. These details, now that I was aware she suspected me at that time, were full of significance, but they gave me no help towards the solving of that first question as to what directed her thoughts my way. It seemed to me, indeed, as I looked back upon the incidents of our acquaintance, that the Countess, almost from our first meeting, had begun to set her husband's death to my account.