It sounds incredible--even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there _were_ fangs beneath her tongue. Heaven knows--it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day--if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes--no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing--the unused ticket, for example--resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room--the whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds--justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo--at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emotion. Filippo was happier, _tout bonnement_, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together--to hound her into suicide, for example--would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had.