"Excuse me," she said, stroking the death-damp sweat from her brow and sliding past him into his room, "but I wanted to see you. I wanted to talk to you. It is something important, it seems to me. I couldn't do it before uncle, and you were with him all day. May we have a--a light?" "Need we?" fell from his lips impulsively, then: "Yes, dear, of course. I quite forgot. I--I sometimes undress in the--the dark in the summer-time." He groped for the button on the wall. "Yes, I was right," he thought. "She has had something on her mind all day and last night, and she says it is important. My God! important! Only one thing is important--can it have come up again?" His fingers touched the button. He pushed it in and the white glare filled the room like a photographer's flash-light, revealing their set visages to each other. William certainly looked old now, for a storm of terror was laying waste his whole suppressed being. She turned from him in sheer pity of his swaying frailty. She sat down in a chair, and, like the ill man that he was, he sank into another. He had unfastened his scarf and collar and the ends of both hung in disorder on his breast. "You say it is something important?" he muttered, and with his hand he made a pretext of shading his eyes. "Yes, William, it is important, as I see it," she answered, her stare on the floor, her bloodless hands in her lap, tightly clasped. "It is about--about a subject we have not mentioned between us lately." "I think I understand," he breathed low. "Then you have heard from him, or at least you know where he went." "Yes, and through Michael," she added. "Michael owed him some money and so he searched for him till finally--" "Oh!" burst eagerly from her listener. "Then it was not the detectives--not the police. You see--you see, I thought--" "No, he is safe in that respect, for a while, at any rate," Celeste said. "Michael found him in a retired place down in the mountains of Georgia, and--" "Why, I--I thought he had gone abroad!" and there was no mistaking the sudden uneasiness in William's tone. "But you say he is still here in this country? Are you sure about that?" "Yes, Michael has seen and talked with him. William, Charlie is very unhappy. Don't think that he is complaining, for he is not, but a new life has opened out before him and he is still young. William, justice must be done to him." The hand-shade fell lower over William's eyes, but she could still see their fixed pupils just beneath the flesh-line of his palm. "Justice!" he gasped. "Surely you are not going to--to hint at that suspicion of yours again. Haven't I shown you--told you that it would make you miserable for life?" "It is not merely a suspicion now, William," she said, grimly. "I know it to be a fact that Charlie is wholly innocent, and that you--But, oh, you know what I mean!"