"But if she had brooded over it," I objected. "She wasn't brooding--at least, she had ceased to brood. You have Mr. Royce's word and the butler's word that she was getting better, brighter, quite like her old self again. Why should she relapse?" "I don't know," I said helplessly. "The more I reason about it, the more unreasonable it all seems. Besides, that affair last night has upset me so that I can't think clearly. I feel that I was careless--that I wasn't doing my duty." "I shouldn't worry about it; though, of course," she added a little severely, "you've realized by this time that you alone are to blame for Martigny's presence on the boat." "But I had to go to the Jourdains'," I protested, "and I couldn't help their going to him--to have asked them not to go would have made them suspect me at once." "Oh, yes; but, at least, you needn't have sent them. They might not have gone at all--certainly they wouldn't have gone so promptly--if you hadn't sent them." "Sent them?" I repeated, and stared at her in amazement, doubting if I had heard aright. "Yes, sent them," she said again, emphatically. "Why do you suppose they went to the hospital so early the next morning?" "I supposed they had become suspicious of me." "Nonsense! What possible reason could they have for becoming suspicious of you. On the contrary, it was because they were _not_ suspicious of you, because they wished to please you, to air your room for you; because, in a word, you asked them to go--they went after the key to those padlocks on the window-shutters. Of course, Martigny had it." For a moment, I was too nonplused to speak; I could only stare at her. Then I found my tongue. "Well, I _was_ a fool, wasn't I?" I demanded bitterly. "To think that I shouldn't have foreseen that! I was so worked up over my discovery that night that I couldn't think of anything else. Of course, when they asked for the key, the whole story came out." "I shouldn't blame myself too severely," laughed Miss Kemball, as she looked at my rueful countenance. "I myself think it's rather fortunate that he's on the boat." "Fortunate? You don't mean that!" "Precisely that. Suppose the Jourdains hadn't gone to him; he'd have left the hospital anyway in two or three days--he isn't the man to lie inactive when he knew you were searching for the fugitives. He'd have returned, then, to his apartment next to yours; your landlady would have told him that you had sailed for Europe, and he had only to examine this boat's passenger-list to discover your name. So you see there wasn't so much lost, after all." "But, at any rate," I pointed out, "he would still have been in America. He couldn't have caught us. We'd have had a good start of him."