The sight of the opened desk gave the fillip to her befogged memory, and suddenly the events of the night rushed back on her with stunning force. She felt, at first, that it must be a dream. But the rifled desk, with the money which the Garcias had gathered up and laid in a glittering heap on the table, told her of its truth. The man’s face, yellow and flabby, with the dark line of the shaven beard clearly marked on his jaws, and the frightened rat’s eyes, came back to her as he had turned in the first paralyzed moment of fear. With hot, unsteady hands she searched through the scattered papers and then about the room, in the hope that he had dropped the paper in the struggle. But all search was fruitless. She remembered his tearing it from her grasp as Barron’s shout had sounded in the passage. He had escaped with it. The irrefutable evidence of the marriage was in Essex’s hands. He had her under his feet. It was the end. She began to dress slowly and with constant pauses. Every movement seemed an effort; every stage of her toilet loomed colossal before her. The one horror of the situation kept revolving in her brain, and she found it impossible to detach her thoughts from it and fix them on anything else. At the same time she could think of no way to escape, or to fight against it. Next Sunday it would all be in _The Era_. Those words seemed written in letters of fire on the walls, and repeated themselves in maddening revolution in her mind. It would all be there, sensationally displayed as other old scandals had been. She saw the tragic secret of the two lives that had sheltered hers, the love that had been so sacred a thing written of with all the defiling brutality of the common scribe and his common reader, for all the world of the low and ignoble to jeer at and spit upon. She stopped in her dressing and pressed her hands to her face. How could she live till next Sunday, and then, when Sunday came, live through it? There were three days yet before Sunday. Might not something be done in three days? But she could think of nothing. Something had happened to her brain. If there was only some one to help her! And with that came the thought of Barron. A flash of relief went through her. He would help her; he would do something. She had no idea what, but something, and, uplifted by the idea, she opened the door and looked up the hall. She felt a sudden drop of hope when she saw that his door was closed. But she stole up the passage, watching it, not knowing what she intended saying to him, only actuated by the desire to throw her responsibilities on him and ask for his help.