about her. Murder. Danglar had spoken of it with inhuman
callousness--and had laughed at it. They were going to take a man's
life. And there was only herself, already driven to extremity, already
with her own back against the wall in an effort to save herself, only
herself to carry the burden of the responsibility of doing something-to
save a man's life.

It seemed to plumb the depths of irony and mockery. She could not make
a move as Gypsy Nan. It would only result in their turning upon her, of
the discovery that she was not Gypsy Nan at all, of the almost certainty
that it would cost her her own life without saving the Sparrow's. That
way was closed to her from the start. As the White Moll, then? Outside
there in the great city, every plain-clothes man, every policeman on
every beat, was staring into every woman's face he met--searching for
the White Moll.

She wrung her hands in cruel desperation. Even to her own problem she
had found no solution, though she had wrestled with it all last night,
and all through the day; no solution save the negative one of clinging
to this one refuge that remained to her, such as it was, temporarily.
She had found no solution to that; what solution was there to this! She
had thought of leaving the city as Gypsy Nan, and then somewhere far
away, of sloughing off the character of Gypsy Nan, and of resuming her
own personality again under an assumed name. But that would have meant
the loss of everything she had in life, her little patrimony, the
irredeemable stamp of shame upon the name she once had owned; and also
the constant fear and dread that at any moment the police net, wide as
the continent was wide, would close around her, as, sooner or later, it
was almost inevitable that it would close around her. It had seemed that
her only chance was to keep on striving to play the role of Gypsy Nan,
because it was these associates of Gypsy Nan who were at the bottom of
the crime of which she, Rhoda Gray, was held guilty, and because there
was always the hope that in this way, through confidences to a supposed
confederate, she could find the evidence that would convict those
actually guilty, and so prove her own innocence. But in holding to
the role of Gypsy Nan for the purpose of receiving those criminal
confidences, she had not thought of this--that upon her would rest the
moral responsibility of other crimes of which she would have knowledge,
and, least of all, that she should be faced w