"But walking here openly, and travelling up and down the country is really inviting recognition," I declared. "You were recognised, you'll remember, in Carlisle, and again in Glasgow. To-morrow you may be seen by one of your friends who will wire to Jack. And if we are found together--what then?" "What then?" she echoed. "Why, I should be found with the man who is my best--my only friend." "But a scandal would be created. You can't afford to risk that, you know." "No," she answered slowly in a low, hard voice, "I suppose you are right, I can't. Neither can you, for the matter of that. Yes," she added, with a deep sigh, "it would be far better for me, as well as for you, if I were dead." I did not reply. What could I say? She seemed filled by a dark foreboding of evil, and her thoughts now naturally reverted to the action over which she had perhaps for weeks or months been brooding. I had endeavoured to assist her for the sake of our passionate idyllic love of long ago, but all was in vain, I said. I recognised that sooner or later she must be discovered, and the blow--the exposure of her terrible crime--must fall. And then? She had killed the man who had held her in thraldom. That was an undoubted fact. Eric had fully explained it, and could testify to the deed, although he would, I knew, never appear as witness against her. The unknown blackguard scorning her defiance had goaded her to a frenzy of madness, and she had taken her revenge upon the cowardly scoundrel. Could she be blamed? In taking a life she had committed a crime before God and man, most certainly. The crime of murder can never be pardoned, yet in such circumstances surely the reader will bear with me for regarding her action with some slight degree of leniency--with what our French neighbours would call extenuating circumstances. And the more so when I recollected what the dead unknown had written to his accomplice in Manchester. The fellow had laid a plot, but he had failed. The woman alone, unprotected and desperate, had defended herself, and he had fallen dead by her hand. In my innermost heart I decided that he deserved the death. Why Ellice Winsloe had recognised the body was plain enough now. The two men were friends--and enemies of Sybil Burnet. I clenched my fingers when I thought of the dangerous man who was still posing as the chum of young Lord Scarcliff, and I vowed that I would live to avenge the wrong done to the poor trembling girl at my side. She burst into hot tears again when I declared that it would be better for us to return again to the obscurity of Camberwell. "Yes," she sobbed. "Act as you think best, Wilfrid. I am entirely in your hands. I am yours, indeed, for you saved my life on--on that night when I fled from Ryhall."