"I can't! I can't!" "Was it in Ramsey--his chambers?" "Yes." "Is he? .... is he anything to me?" Bessie dropped her head still deeper into Fenella's lap and made no answer. "Is he?" said Fenella, and in her gathering terror, getting no reply, she lifted Bessie's head and looked searchingly into her face, as if to probe her soul. At the next moment the dreadful truth had fallen on her. The girl's fellow-sinner, the man she had been hunting down to punish him, to shame him, to expose him to public obloquy, was Victor Stowell himself! At the first shock of the revelation the woman in Fenella asserted itself--the simple, natural, deceived and outraged woman. This girl had gone before her! This common, uneducated creature of the fields and the farmyard! For one cruel moment she had a vision of Bessie in Stowell's arms. This was the face he had loved! These were the lips he had kissed! And she had thought he had loved her only--never having loved anybody else! A feeling of disgust came over her. The girl had not even had the excuse of caring for Stowell. She had been thinking merely of a way of escape from the tyrannies of her step-father. Or perhaps an admixture of sheer animal instinct had impelled her. How degrading it all was! Bessie, who had begun to realise what she had done, tried to take her hand, but Fenella drew back and cried, "Don't touch me!" All the thoughts of years about woman as the victim seemed to be burnt up in an instant in the furnace of her outraged feelings. An almost unconquerable impulse came to leave Bessie to her fate. Let her pay the penalty of her crime! Why shouldn't she? But after a while a great pity for the girl came over her. If she had sinned she had also suffered. If she was there, in prison, it was only because she had been trying in her ignorant way to wipe out her fault. But she herself .... her hopes gone, her love wasted.... Fenella bursted into a flood of tears. And then Bessie (the two women had changed places now) began to comfort her. "I'm sorry. I didn't think what I was doing. Don't cry." At the next moment they were in each other's arms, crying like children--two poor ship-broken women on the everlasting ocean of man's changeless lust. Bessie was the first to recover. She was full of hope and expectation, and visions of the future. Now that she had confessed everything the Deemster would tell the Jury to let her off, and then Alick would forgive her also. "He _will_ forgive me, will he not?" She was like a child again, and Fenella found a cruel relief in humouring her. "Yes, yes," she answered. "When I leave this place I'm going to be so good," said Bessie. "I will make him such a happy life. We'll be married immediately--by Bishop's licence, you know--and then leave the Isle of Man and go to America. He often spoke of that, and it will be best .... After all this trouble it will be best, don't you think so?" "No doubt, no doubt," said Fenella.