referred to work it out alone, she said, and
give him the outlines only when she had settled them. It chanced to be a
day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some
clew to her identity, expressed his surprise that she should have been
allowed to venture out.

"Oh, no one worries about what I do," she said, indifferently "I go about
as I choose."

"So much the better for me," he laughed. "That's how you came to be
wandering on old Wayne's terrace, just in the nick of time. What stumps me
is the promptness with which you thought of stowing me away."

"It wasn't promptness, exactly. As a matter of fact, I had worked the
whole thing out beforehand."

His eyebrows went up incredulously. "For me?"

"No, not for you; for anybody. Ever since my guardian allowed me to build
the studio--last year--I've imagined how easy it would be for some--some
hunted person to stay hidden here, almost indefinitely. I've tried to
fancy it, when I've had nothing better to do."

"You don't seem to have had anything better to do very often," he
observed, glancing about the cabin.

"If you mean that I haven't painted much, that's quite true. I thought I
couldn't do without a studio--till I got one. But when I've come here, I'm
afraid it's generally been to--to indulge in day-dreams."

"Day-dreams of helping prisoners to escape. It wouldn't be every girl's
fancy, but it's not for me to complain of that."

"My father would have wanted me to do it," she declared, as if in
self-justification. "A woman once helped him to get out of prison."

"Good for her! Who was she?"

Having asked the question lightly, in a boyish impulse to talk, he was
surprised to see her show signs of embarrassment.

"She was my mother," she said, after an interval in which she seemed to be
making up her mind to give the information.

In the manifest difficulty she had in speaking, Ford sprang to her aid.

"That's like the old story of Gilbert A Becket--Thomas A Becket's father,
you know."

The historical reference was received in silence, as she bent over the
small task she had in hand.

"He married the woman who helped him out of prison," Ford went on, for her
enlightenment.

She raised her head and faced him.

"It wasn't like the story of Gilbert A Becket," she said, quietly.

It took some seconds of Ford's slow thinking to puzzle out the meaning of
this. Even then he might have pondered in vain had it not been for the
flu