heart. I was afraid of him now that I knew him, yet I never
thought of flying his presence or revealing his crime. He was, villain
or no villain, my husband, and nothing could ever undo that fact or make
it true that I had never loved him.

So I went in, but went in slowly and with downcast eyes. The bead and
the paper I had dropped into my _vinaigrette_, which fortunately hung at
my side.

"Humphrey," I said, "when are we going to leave this house? I begin to
find it lonesome."

He was preparing to gather up his papers for his accustomed trip down
town, but he stopped as I spoke, and look at me curiously.

"You are pale," he remarked, "change and travel will benefit you.
Dearest, we will try to sail for Europe in a week."

A week! What did he mean? Leave his prisoners--alas, I understood his
journeys to the top of the house now--and go away to Europe? I felt
myself grow livid at the thought, and caught a spray of lilac from the
table where I stood and held it to my face.

"Will your business affairs warrant it?" I asked. "Are you sure Mrs.
Ransome's affairs will not suffer by your absence?" Then, as I saw him
turn white, I made a ghastly effort, happily hid by the flowers I held
pressed against my face, and suggested, laughingly, "How, if she
should come back after your departure! would she meet the greeting she
deserves?"

He was half the room away from me, but I heard the click of subdued
passion in his throat, and turned sick almost to the point of fainting.
"It is four days since you mentioned Mrs. Ransome's name," he said.
"When we are gone from here you must promise that it shall never again
pass your lips. Mrs. Ransome is not a good woman, Delight."

It was a lie yet his manner of speaking it, and the look with which he
now approached me, made me feel helpless again, and I made haste to rush
from the room, ostensibly to prepare for our trip down town, in order
to escape my own weakness and gain a momentary self-possession before we
faced the outside world. Only eighteen years old and confronted by such
a diabolical problem!

CHAPTER V. THE STOLEN KEY.

I Was too young to reason in those days. Had I not been, had I been able
to say to myself that no act requiring such continued precaution
could take place in the heart of a great city without ultimate, if not
instant, detection, instinct would still have assured me that what I
read was true, however improbable or unheard of it might seem. That
t