And yet, morning and evening the sickening doubts returned, and he recalled again that it was almost in her presence that Marlowe had made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was by the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house. Had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or had he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her then, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like honest evidence. Or—the question would never be silenced, though he scorned it—had she lain expecting the footsteps in the room and the whisper that should tell her that it was done? Among the foul possibilities of human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle seeming? These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone. Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay for six months, and then returned to Paris where he went to work again with a better heart. His powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he had expected among a tribe of strangely assorted friends, French, English, and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen, hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and others. His old faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman’s family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of _les jeunes_, and found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life as the departed _jeunes_ of ten years before had been.