He was torn with anxiety on her account, and, forgetting his disgust, his doubts, his fears, he set about contriving some way of helping her to escape from the difficulties which threatened her. He excused his eagerness in this perhaps questionable work, by telling himself that he did not, after all, know anything against her, that all his suspicions were mere surmise. But the very fact that he feared arrest for her betrayed his real belief, and he himself felt ashamed that he was so eager on her behalf. More and more startling, as he knew her better, had grown the difference between her character as unfolded in her confidential talk, and the avocations of which he more than suspected her. She spoke and looked like a woman of the highest honor, the strongest sense of right and duty; and yet on every side he met with circumstances which seemed to point to her being engaged in crime! One hope, and only one, remained to him; this was that she could be proved to be acting under an impulse so irresistible that what she did was no longer to be called crime at all, but irresponsibility. But though he had frequently heard the plea put forward on behalf of this or that woman afflicted in a similar manner, it was not surprising that, in spite of himself, he shrank from accepting, fully and straightforwardly, this explanation of the conduct of the woman whom, in the face of every doubt, he felt that he still loved. Wistfully, despairingly, he still clung to the hope that some other way out of the difficulty would be found; that the mystery about her would be cleared up satisfactorily, and that he would be able once more to look upon her with the adoring eyes of his first day’s acquaintance. In the meantime, uneasy and perturbed, he conceived the idea of going in the direction of the police-station which was nearest to the stores, with the vague notion that he might learn something in that neighborhood of what had happened that afternoon. So he went part of the distance by train, and part on foot, and approached the police-station at a slow pace, looking about him observantly. The sight that met his eyes as he drew near seemed to turn him to stone. Rachel Davison, closely veiled and with bent head, was being led into the building, with a policeman on one side of her and a man on the other, whom he recognized by his dress as the one he had seen going out of the tea-shop that evening, after giving her a sign that she was to come out. She had been arrested then, after all! CHAPTER IX Gerard was puzzled; he had long since ceased to be capable of horror at anything he saw done in connection with Rachel Davison. He did not even feel sure that she had been arrested; for he knew by this time that she was, as she had said, quite capable of taking care of herself, and that, although it looked as if she were in charge of the policeman and a detective, she might yet succeed in escaping from their clutches.