At the foot of the stairs she had hesitated, undecided whether to go by the living-room or the kitchen. Finally she chose the way she knew best, where she was familiar with the disposition of the furniture. As the flashlight burst she had made a noiseless rush for the stairs, was in the upper passage when the women’s doors flew open and Rawson came running along the hall below. The darkness and noise had covered her flight, but in her eyrie on the top floor she had crouched at the head of the stairs sick with uncertainty and dread. The concerted shrieks of the women had come eerily to her--cries of her own name. She guessed then a picture had been taken, they had seen it, and she waited not knowing what was coming. She had stayed there a long time, listening with every sense alert, heard silence gathering over the house and then gone back to her place by the window: “I hadn’t given up, I had the spirit to fight still. But it was so awful not knowing anything, what they were doing, if they’d found out I was alive. And what was I to do--stay here, get out on the island? I couldn’t tell, I was all in the dark, and I felt my nerve weaken for the first time. And then I heard your voice, Anne, ‘I’m coming to help you,’ it said.” She drew back and looked with solemn meaning into the other’s face. “You meant it? You will help me?” “Sybil, you know it.” “There’s only one way you can.” “Any way.” “Let me go.” “Never tell--that you were here--that it wasn’t you?” “Yes, let me stay dead. Everybody believes it, let them go on believing. It _was_ death, my life since that night when Jim disappeared. It wasn’t worth going on with. Now I can go to him, be with him, there’ll be no one watching Sybil Saunders any more. Even if I looked like myself it would be only the chance resemblance to a murdered woman. And do I look like myself?” She turned her face to the light, bright now with the coming of the sun. Below the smooth sweep of hair across her forehead it was so changed in its pallor and thinness, so bereft of its rounded curves and delicate freshness that it was only a dim reflection of Sybil’s--the face of a way-worn lad in whom the same blood ran. The havoc worked by the suffering that had so transfigured it drove like a knife to Anne’s heart. She felt the prick of tears under her eyelids and lowered her head--Sybil gripping at her happiness with the fierce courage of despair, and now Sybil going, breaking all ties, going forever. For a moment she could not speak and the other, thinking her silence meant reluctance to agree, caught at her hands, pleading, with breathless urgence: