red. "A journalist from the
_Yorkshire Herald_ was with him for two hours this afternoon."

"Blanche--I was told that he was dead," Mannering said.

"Then the story is true?" Fardell asked.

"Not as you have told it," Mannering answered.

"There is truth in it?"

"Yes."

Richard Fardell was silent for several moments. He paced up and down the
room, his hands behind his back, his eyebrows contracted into a heavy
frown. For him it was a bitter moment. He was only a half-educated,
illiterate man, possessed of sturdy common sense and a wonderful tenacity
of purpose. He had permitted himself to indulge in a little silent but
none the less absolute hero-worship, and Mannering had been the hero.

"You must come with me at once and see this man," he said at last. "He
has not yet signed his statement. We must do what we can to keep him
quiet."

Mannering took up his coat and hat without a word. They left the hotel,
and Fardell summoned a cab.

"It is a long way," he explained. "We will drive part of the distance and
walk the rest. We may be watched already."

Mannering nodded. The last blow was so unexpected that he felt in a sense
numbed. His speech only a few hours ago had made large inroads upon his
powers of endurance. His partial recantation had cost him many hours of
torture, from which he was still suffering. And now, without the
slightest warning, he found himself face to face with a crisis far
graver, far more acute. Never in his most gloomy moments had he felt any
real fear of a resurrection of the past such as that with which he was
now threatened. It was a thunderbolt from a clear sky. Even now he found
it hard to persuade himself that he was not dreaming.

They were in the cab for nearly half an hour before Fardell stopped and
dismissed it. Then they walked up and down and across streets of small
houses, pitiless in their monotony, squalid and depressing in their
ugliness.

Finally Fardell stopped, and without hesitation knocked at the door of
one of them. It was opened by a man in shirt-sleeves, holding a tallow
candle in his hand.

"What yer want?" he inquired, suspiciously.

"Your lodger," Fardell answered, pushing past him and drawing Mannering
into the room. "Where is he?"

The man jerked his thumb upwards.

"Where he won't be long," he answered, shortly. "The likes of 'im having
visitors, and one a toff, too. Say, are yer going to pay his rent?"

"We may do that," Fardell answered. "Is he