She was crimson herself. The judge moved away with a stealthy uncomfortable air. He didn't half care for this uncanny young woman. A girl who can read people's thoughts like that, a girl who can play with you like a cat with a mouse, oughtn't to be allowed at large in society. She should be shut up in a cage at home like a dangerous animal, and prevented from spying out the inmost history of families. A little later, Elma had twenty minutes' talk with Cyril alone. It was in the tea-room behind, where the light refreshments were laid out before supper. She spoke low and seriously. "Cyril," she said, in a tone of absolute confidence--they were not engaged, of course, but still, it had got to plain "Cyril" and "Elma" by this time--"I'm surer of it than ever, no matter what you say. Guy's perfectly innocent. I know it as certainly as I know my own name. I can't be mistaken. And the man who really did it is, as I told you, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve." "My dear child," Cyril answered--you call the girl you are in love with "my dear child," when you mean to differ from her, with an air of masculine superiority--"how on earth can that be, when, as I told you, I have Guy's confession in writing, under his own very hand, that he really did it?" "I don't care a pin for that," Elma cried, with a true woman's contempt for anything so unimportant as mere positive evidence. "Perhaps Sir Gilbert made him do it somehow--compelled him, or coerced him, or willed him, or something--I don't understand these new notions--or perhaps he got him into a scrape and then hadn't the courage or the manliness to get him out of it. But at any rate, I can answer for one thing, I were to go to the stake for it--Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve is the man who's really guilty." As she spoke, a great shadow darkened the door of the room for a moment ominously. Sir Gilbert looked in with a lady on his arm--the inevitable dowager who refreshes herself continuously at frequent intervals through six hours of entertainment. When he saw those two tete-a-tete, he drew back, somewhat disconcerted. "Don't let's go in there, Lady Knowles," he whispered to the dowager by his side. "A pair of young people discussing their hearts. We were once young ourselves. It's a pity to disturb them." And he passed on across the hall towards the great refreshment-room opposite. "Well, I don't know," Cyril said bitterly, as the judge disappeared through the opposite door. "I wish I could agree with you. But I can't, I can't. The burden of it's heavier than my shoulders can bear. Guy's weak, I know, and might be led half unawares into certain sorts of crime; yet I only knew one man ever likely to lead him--and that was poor Nevitt himself, not Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve, whom he hardly even knew to speak to." As he paused and reflected, a servant with a salver came up and looked into Cyril's face inquiringly. "Beg your pardon, sir," he said, hesitating, "but I think you're Mr. Waring."