'I wonder,' she wrote, 'why it is that a pure and unmitigated pleasure, one totally unassociated with any pain, one perfectly free from any drawback, should not avail to crush, at least for a time, the oppressing pain and dread which has been troubling me of late. If I have, as I believe I have, a relentless enemy in Trenton Warren, I have a friend upon whose fidelity I may rely, whose love I can trust with all my heart, and accept with all my conscience, to oppose to him. My friend is a cleverer man than my enemy; he surpasses him by all the distance which makes a gentleman to surpass a man who is not a gentleman; his will is as steadfast; his courage is, or I am much mistaken, far more high; of his devotion to me I have many years' experience; of his devotion to Alston I have the guarantee of a nature large enough and good enough to contain that great virtue, gratitude; and yet there is no reassurance, there is no consolation, there is no rest for me in all this knowledge. I don't think it would come, if even I should tell Thornton what is in my heart; and that I could not do! I could not bear that lie should know that such a profanation had ever overtaken me as the avowal of this man's hideous love; the mere remembrance of it seems to stain my soul, as it troubles my repose; it has gotten into my life like a bad influence. When I awake in the morning, I think not of Alston, but of Warren, and I welcome sleep because it shuts out the hateful remembrance. I must shake this off, or I shall turn the fancied evil into a real one, and give my own fears their worst fulfilment.' CHAPTER IV. 'SCOT FREE.' On the morning after the murder, so much of the daylight as could force its way through the begrimed glass, or greased paper acting as substitute for absent glass, in the low window of the tramps' home struggled in a shame-faced manner into the den, and faintly revealed the prostrate forms of its inhabitants. Most of them were still asleep, but by one man there the advent of that streak of light had been long and anxiously looked for. This was the man dressed in sailor's clothes, whose dread proceedings on the previous night have been at length recounted; he who was called Tom Summers by those lying around him, and whose demand for a pillow, and complaint of the loss of his bundle, had alternately roused their scorn and mirth.