Meanwhile a messenger had been sent to Dalton Hall for the carriage. Edith, though she had revived, hardly felt strong enough for horseback, and Dudleigh's arm was sufficiently painful to make him prefer as great a degree of quiet as possible. When the carriage came, therefore, it was with feelings of great relief that they took their seats and prepared to go back. Nor was their journey any the less pleasant from the fact that they had to sit close together, side by side--a closer union than any they had thus far known. It was an eventful day; nor was its conclusion the least so. But little was said during the drive home. Each felt what bad been done by the other. Edith remembered how Dudleigh had risked the most terrible, the most agonizing of deaths to save her. Dudleigh, on his part, remembered that movement of hers, by which she was about to take the poison from his wound unto herself. The appalling event which had occurred had broken down all reserve. All was known. Each knew that the other was dearer than all the world. Each knew that the other loved and was loved; but yet in the midst of this knowledge there was a feeling of utter helplessness arising from the unparalleled position of Edith. It was a peculiar and at the same time a perilous one. In the eyes of the world these two were nothing less than man and wife. In the eyes of the law, as Edith feared, she was the wife of Leon Dudleigh. Now this man was not Leon Dudleigh. He was an impostor. Edith did not even know that his name was Dudleigh at all. She had never asked him the secret of his life; he had never volunteered to tell it. She did not know what his name really was. As an impostor, she knew that he was liable to discovery, arrest, and punishment at any time. She knew that the discovery of this man would endanger herself. His arrest would involve hers, and she would once more be tried for her life, as the murderer of the missing man, with the additional disadvantage of having already eluded justice by a trick. She was liable at any moment to this, for the missing man was still missing, and it would go doubly hard for her, since she had aided and abetted for so long a time the conspiracy of an impostor. Yet this impostor was beyond all doubt a man of the loftiest character, most perfect breeding, and profoundest self-devotion. From the very first his face had revealed to her that he had entered upon this conspiracy for her sake. And since then, for her sake, what had he not done? Thus, then, they were both in a position of peril. They loved one another passionately. But they could not possess one another. The world supposed them man and wife, but the law made her the wife of another, of whom it also charged her with being the murderer. Around these two there were clouds of darkness, deep and dense, and their future was utterly obscure.