at there had been no other caller but
yourself."

His hearer expressed a deep, involuntary relief. "I was there late in
the afternoon," he acknowledged; "but I left around six." Stephen
Jannan, too, showed a sudden relaxation. "I have already sent a message
to the Mayor," he continued; "confident that you would clear yourself
without delay. Mrs. Scofield's history is, of course, known to the
police. You have only to establish your alibi; she, Essie Scofield,
can't be found for the moment. She may have taken an early stage out of
the city; but it is probable that she has only moved into another police
district. Just where were you, Jasper?"

The latter said stupidly, "Walking with Susan Brundon."

A swiftly augmented concern gathered on Stephen Jannan's countenance.
"You were walking with Susan," he repeated increduously. "Yes," Jasper
asserted, with a sharp inner dread. "You don't know, but I want to marry
her." Stephen Jannan faced him with an exclamation of anger. "You want
to marry her, and, in consequence, drag her, Susan, into the dirtiest
affair the city is like to know for years. Susan Brundon, with her
Academy; all she has, all her labour, destroyed, ruined, pulled to
pieces by slanderous tongues! By God, Jasper, what a beast you look! The
most delicate woman, alive, the one farthest from just this sort of
muck, being sworn in the Mayor's office, testifying in an obscene murder
case, before the Sheriff and Constable, and heaven knows what police and
vilely curious!"

A sickening feeling of utter destruction seized on Jasper Penny, a
dropping of his entire being from the heights of yesterday to the last
degradation. He felt the blood leave his heart and pound dizzily in his
brain, and then recede, followed by an icy coldness, a wavering of the
commonplace objects of the room. He raised his fingers to his collar,
stared with burning eyes at Stephen Jannan. "Everything spoiled," the
latter said again; "her pupils will positively be taken from her at once
by all the nice females. Her name will be pronounced, smiled over, in
every despicable quarter of the city, printed in the daily sheets. I--I
can't forgive you for this. Susan, our especial joy!"

Jasper Penny saw in a flash, as vivid and remorseless as a stab of
lightning, that this was all true. The fatality of the past, sweeping
forward in a black, strangling tide, had overtaken not only himself but
Susan, too; Susan, in soft merino, in an azure velvet cloa