"I knew he would denounce me," she cried bitterly. "He has been my bitterest enemy from the very first. To that man I owe all my sorrow and degradation. He and his friends are fiends--veritable fiends in human shape--vampires who have sucked the blood of the innocent, and cast them away in secret in that dark house in Clipstone Street without mercy and without compunction. He carried out his threat once, and denounced me, but he did not succeed in effecting my ruin. And now, when arrested he has told the police what--what, Wilfrid, is, alas! the truth." "The truth!" I gasped, drawing away from her in horror. "The truth, Sybil. Then you are really guilty," I wailed. "Ah! Heaven--I believed you were innocent!" She stood swaying to and fro, then staggering unevenly to the table, gripped it to save herself from falling. Her countenance was bloodless and downcast. "I--I thought to hide my secret from you, of all men," she faltered. "I feared that if you knew all you would hate and despise me, therefore my lips were sealed by fear of those men on the one hand, and on the other because I still strove to retain you as my friend and protector. I have remained silent, allowing you to form your own conclusions--nay," she added bitterly, "allowing you to place yourself in a position of great personal peril, for I knew how they entrapped you in that awful place, and how they believed you dead like the others." And she paused, her nervous fingers twisting the cheap jet brooch at her throat. "But you will tell me now," I urged quickly, "you will tell me the truth, Sybil."