akness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed the
vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathed
the woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can
scent true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inward
certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against
this that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to
the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of
starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to
Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of
his deadly purpose he did not believe.

And yet, morning and evening the sickening doubts returned, and he
recalled again that it was almost in her presence that Marlowe had made
his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was by the
window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house. Had he
forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or had he,
as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her then,
and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of the
masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like honest
evidence. Or--the question would never be silenced, though he scorned
it--had she lain expecting the footsteps in the room and the whisper
that should tell her that it was done? Among the foul possibilities of
human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black deceit
as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle seeming?

These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.

Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay for six months, and then
returned to Paris where he went to work again with a better heart. His
powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than
he had expected among a tribe of strangely assorted friends, French,
English, and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,
hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and others. His old
faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in
his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed
again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's
family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of les jeunes, and
found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life
as the departed jeunes of ten years before had been.