In an impulse of mad, unreasoning jealousy she had committed a terrible deed, but the name of her victim and of the girl from whom she saved him remained a sealed mystery to her--but a mystery that haunted her, for often in her dreams she lived over those dreadful moments and the night of horror in which she believed that she had killed Percy Seabright, and she would awaken with her face bathed in a cold dew of anguish. But all the time she believed that her dread secret was known to God alone--to God and her own self. Little did she dream that her life lay in the slender white hands of the girl she hated, but who, knowing herself thus hated and persecuted, was too generous to betray her foe. So Italy, knowing all the fatal truth, was suddenly confronted with the startling fact that a Nemesis was on the track of Craig Severn’s slayer--a Nemesis in the shape of the beautiful young widow, who held it as a holy mission to bring the criminal to justice and avenge his death. She was startled, unnerved, utterly confounded by the suddenness of the knowledge. She felt that if she stayed there another moment with Craig Severn’s portrait staring at her from the easel, and his broken-hearted widow whispering to her of the clue she had found, she would have to scream out aloud in her distress. She rose up abruptly, her lovely young face as white as it would ever be in its coffin. “I--I must go. Pray excuse me, madam,” she faltered, and hurried to her own room as fast as her trembling limbs would permit. Then she fell upon the bed and lay for some time unconscious. She came back to herself presently with a long, shuddering sigh, and remembered everything. “I was going to Mr. Gardner’s office, but--I must not now, for that terrible boy would see me and know me,” she thought, and she suddenly realized that it was almost providential--that interview with Mrs. Severn. “For if she had not sent for me I should have gone on to the law-office, and blundered straight upon that terrible boy that is watching for my face,” she thought. It seemed to Italy as if the tables had been turned with a vengeance. Hitherto she had been trying to hunt down a murderer and bring him to justice. Now she was being hunted down herself. The sensation was not agreeable. At the end of her cogitations she decided: “Self-preservation is the first law of nature. If the worst comes to the worst, and I am accused of Craig Severn’s murder, I shall have to denounce Mrs. Dunn for her crime.” Then she began to wonder what Mrs. Severn would think of her wild exit from the room. “Perhaps she will suspect me of being the very girl she is after. I must go and make some excuse,” she thought. She bit her lips and rubbed her face to bring back some of the vanished color, then she stopped a minute to pet her canary that was chirping forlornly in his gilded cage. “Darling little Frankie, I will lay it all on you,” she cooed sweetly.