tation for which she was
glad to have some reasonable excuse. She held out both her hands to
Lessingham.

"Dick is back--just arrived!" she exclaimed. "I can't tell you how happy
we are, and how grateful!"

Lessingham raised her fingers to his lips.

"I am glad," he said simply. "Do you mean that he is in the house here,
now?"

"He is in the dining room with Helen."

Lessingham for a moment was thoughtful.

"Don't you think," he suggested, "that it would be better to keep us
apart?"

"I was wondering," she confessed.

"Have you told him about my bringing the letters?"

She shook her head.

"We nearly did. Then I stopped--I wasn't sure."

"You were wise," he said.

"Are you wise?" she asked him quickly.

"In coming back here?"

She nodded.

"Captain Griffiths knows everything," she reminded him. "He is simply
furious because your arrest was interfered with. I really believe that
he is dangerous."

Lessingham was unmoved.

"I had to come back," he said simply.

"Why did you go away so suddenly?"

"Well, I had to do that, too," he replied, "only the governing causes
were very different. We will speak, if you do not mind, only of the
cause which has brought me back. That I believe you know already."

Philippa was curiously afraid. She looked towards the door as though
with some vague hope of escape. She realised that the necessity for
decision had arrived.

"Philippa," he went on, "do you see what this is?"

He handed her two folded slips of paper. She started. At the top of one
she recognised a small photograph of herself.

"What are they?" she asked. "What does it mean?"

"They are passports for America," he told her.

"For--for me?" she faltered.

"For you and me."

They slipped from her fingers. He picked them up from the carpet. Her
face was hidden for a moment in her hands.

"I know so well how you are feeling," he said humbly. "I know how
terrible a shock this must seem to you when it comes so near. You are
so different from the other women who might do this thing. It is so much
harder for you than for them."

She lifted her head. There was still something of the look of a scared
child in her face.

"Don't imagine me better than I am," she begged. "I am not really
different from any other woman, only it is the first time this sort of
thing has ever come into my life."

"I know. You see," he went on, a little wistfully, "you have not taken
me, as yet, very far into your con