stormily, but always faithfully--beaconed me inshore; and the
plank of faith in him, faith that held in itself something of forgiving
charity, floated out to succor my drowning soul. I moved across the room
while Standish Burton kept his unwinking gaze upon me, and Leila never
looked up from the piano. I had come beside Dick before he heard me.

He looked at me as if he had only just then remembered that I was there.
Into his eyes flashed a look of poignant remorse. He shrank back from me
a little as I touched his hand, and I turned to Leila, who had not
stirred from the place where she had listened to Standish's cry when he
took the fateful message. "We are going," I said, "to do what we
can--for her."

She moved then to look at me, and I saw that her eyes held not the
compassion I had feared, but a strange speculativeness, as if she
questioned what I knew rather than what I felt. Their contemplating
quiet somehow disturbed me more than had her husband's flashlight
scrutiny, and with eyes suddenly blinded and throat drawn tight with
terror I took my way beside Dick Allport out from the soft lights of the
Burtons' house into the darkness of the night.

Outside we paused a moment, waiting for a cab. For the first time since
he had told Leila of Bessie Lowe, Dick spoke to me. "I think," he said,
"that it would be just as well if you didn't come."

"I must," I told him, "It isn't curiosity. You understand that, don't
you? It is simply that this is the time for me to stand by you, if ever
I shall do it, Dick."

"I don't deserve it." There was a break in his voice. "But I shall try
to, my dear. I can't promise you much, but I can promise you that."

Down the brightness of Piccadilly into the fuller glow of Regent Street
we rode without speech. Somewhere below the Circus we turned aside and
went through dim canons of houses that opened a way past the Museum and
let us into Bloomsbury. There in a wilderness of cheap hotels and
lodging-houses we found the Meynard.

A gas lamp was flaring in the hall when the porter admitted us. At a
desk set under the stairway a pale-faced clerk awaited us with staring
insolence that shifted to annoyance when Dick asked him if we might go
to Bessie Lowe's room. "No," he said, abruptly. "The officers won't let
any one in there. They've taken her to the undertaker's."

He gave us the location of the place with a scorn that sent us out in
haste. I, at least, felt a sense of relief that I d