“What do you mean?” she demanded. “I don’t know what you are talking about, with your miserable innuendoes.” Martin’s face paled. “Innuendoes!” he burst out, losing his temper; “then I’ll speak plainly, since you demand it! Since when, Miss Barrington, have you made a practice of shielding—murderers?” He regretted the word the instant it had left his lips, but he forced himself to meet Miss Barrington’s horrified gaze unflinchingly. “Murderer!” she gasped. “Hustler Joe was no murderer!” At that moment Mr. Barrington re-entered the room and Martin turned to him in relief. Five minutes later he had made his adieus and left the house. XV Murderer! Ethel fled to her room and locked the door, but the word laughed at bolts and bars. It looked from the walls and the pictures and peeped at her from the pages of the book she tried to read. She opened the window and gazed up at the stars, but they, too, knew the hated word and spelled it out in twinkling points of light. Murderer? Ah, no, it could not be—and yet—— Away back in Ethel’s memory was a picture of the Deerfield woods that skirted the lawn at The Maples. She saw the tall, grave-faced miner and the imperious girl, and even now the words rang in her ears—“I’m not the good man you think, Miss Barrington!” Half-forgotten tales of “Hustler Joe’s queerness” came to her, too, and assumed an appearance of evil. And was this to be the explanation of that ride—that ride on which she had almost betrayed herself only to be met by stern words of conventionality? Was this the meaning of the infrequent calls, the averted face, the eyes so misery-laden if by chance they met her own? A murderer? Ah, no, no! He was so good—so kind—so brave! There were Pedler Jim, the miners whose lives he had saved, and the multitudes of the city’s poor to give the lie to so base a charge; and yet—Martin had said that these very benefactions were but a lullaby to a guilty conscience. The night brought Ethel no relief. The dark was peopled with horrid shapes; and sleep, when it came, was dream-haunted and unrefreshing. In the morning, weary and heavy-eyed, she awoke to a day of restless wandering from room to room. Twenty-four hours later her trunk was packed and she was on her way to The Maples. It was at about this time that Westbrook’s philanthropy took a new turn. He began to spend long hours in the city prison while society looked on and shrugged disdainful shoulders. The striped-garbed creatures behind the bars seemed to possess a peculiar fascination for him. He haunted their habitation daily, yet he never failed to shudder at every clang of the iron doors.