"'Yes--yes--young and dark-complexioned, with a black moustache,' she repeated like an echo. 'It must have been he--it could have been no other than he! Poor Evan! What an end--what a terrible end!" "She turned and buried her face in the sofa-cushions, and presently her slight frame was shaken by those dry-eyed, almost silent sobs which bear witness to a grief that, for the time being, is beyond the consolation of tears. "I knew not what to do--of no way in which I could comfort her. The conditions of the case were so exceptional that I felt myself utterly helpless. I could only sit and look dumbly on. "'Poor Evan!' she had said. I did not forget that Evan Wildash was the name of her one-time lover, who was said to have gone to the Cape years before, and to have died there. "After a time, without lifting her face from the cushions, she said, 'Leave me now, dear Miss Sudlow. Come to me at the same time to-morrow, when I shall have more to say to you.' "I need not tell you, my dear Phil, with what impatience I awaited the afternoon of the morrow. In the interim Mrs. Melray kept closely to her rooms, being waited upon by her own maid and being present at none of the family meals. "I found her on the second afternoon just as I had found her on the first; it might have been five minutes instead of twenty-four hours since I had left her last. She was very pale, but perfectly composed. 'I want you to sit, please, where you sat yesterday,' she said. "For a little while she lay back on her cushions with drooping eye-lids and close-drawn brows. "'When I came to think over what passed at our interview yesterday,' at length she began, 'I saw that two courses were open to me. I might have professed my entire ignorance of the writer of the manuscript found in the railway carriage; have averred that all that part of the narrative prior to the murder which concerns itself with the "young wife" and her lover was sheer romance, that I had never had a lover since I was sixteen, and that he had died in Africa years ago; and, finally, I might have defied anyone to prove that I knew one iota more in connection with my husband's death than was given by me in evidence at the inquest. That was one of the two courses open to me, and to most women in my position it is the one which would have recommended itself to them.