"Don't worry. You have done no harm," she said. "If anyone could plead for him it would be you, you kind, dear soul. You make me feel--" She hesitated, and straightening herself stood slowly upright, looking gravely into the lifted face,--"mean," she added, after a pause. She clasped her hands behind her, and turning her back to the puzzled, questioning, tear-swollen eyes that stared up at her in helpless wonderment, gazed out upon the view. Through a break in the trees the great square rock that is Table Mountain showed in the clear atmosphere so surprisingly near that it seemed as though it formed a boundary to the garden. The sunlight lay warmly on its rugged prominences leaving the clefts and crannies in its grey sides cold and dark and secretive, the lurking-places of mystery and shadows, hiding ever from the light like the evil thoughts of a man's mind. Zoe Lawless gazed at the mountain, looking blue in the brilliant sunshine, and her eyes were clouded as the dark clefts in its sides. She was ashamed of the part she had deliberately played, ashamed above all of having deceived this woman who was her friend. "I'm wondering what you are thinking of me," she said quickly. "And it hurts. I care... so much. You tempt me to tell you things--things that I keep double-locked in my heart--in order to justify myself." She turned round suddenly, frowning, and tapped her foot impatiently on the stone floor of the stoep. "Merely to justify myself!" she repeated... "Was ever a more paltry reason given than that? Shall I tell you, Kate? ... Shall I show you the wound in my breast... the ugly, raw, unhealing wound that I am for ever tearing open with my own hand? I would tell you what I would not tell another human being sooner than you should think ill of me." "If that is your only reason for giving me your confidence, there is no need," the other answered. "It's just because I think so highly of you, Zoe, that I feel the disappointment so keenly. But perhaps it's as well that you don't care, because... in the event of..." Here she broke down completely, her thoughts so charged with gruesome possibilities that Mrs Lawless' efforts at reassurance were futile. It was impossible, she declared, to accept comfort with the idea of the hangman's rope ever present in her mind. "I'm waiting for Theo to come up from town," she said tearfully. "He's gone to interview lawyers and barristers, and anyone who is likely to be able to help. Thank Heaven the assizes are on this month! I don't know how I should bear a longer suspense." Mr Smythe reached home as Mrs Lawless was driving away. She stopped the car when she saw him, and he got out of the taxi he had driven up from town in and went to speak to her. "You've been with Kate," he said. "I'm glad of that. She's horribly cut up, poor girl! It's a bad business... very. Looks black for Karl." "You think,"--Mrs Lawless shivered involuntarily--"that he won't be able to clear himself?"