the slip of paper.

"Thank you," said Sarah, with a bewitching smile, and swept down to
her cab again. John Rex was gnawing his nails in sullen apathy. She
displayed the passage-ticket. "You are saved. By the time Mr. Francis
Wade gets his wits together, and his sister recovers her speech, we
shall be past pursuit."

"To Sydney!" cries Rex angrily, looking at the warrant. "Why there of
all places in God's earth?"

Sarah surveyed him with an expression of contempt. "Because your scheme
has failed. Now this is mine. You have deserted me once; you will do so
again in any other country. You are a murderer, a villain, and a coward,
but you suit me. I save you, but I mean to keep you. I will bring you to
Australia, where the first trooper will arrest you at my bidding as an
escaped convict. If you don't like to come, stay behind. I don't care.
I am rich. I have done no wrong. The law cannot touch me--Do you agree?
Then tell the man to drive to Silver's in Cornhill for your outfit."

Having housed him at last--all gloomy and despondent--in a quiet tavern
near the railway station, she tried to get some information as to this
last revealed crime.

"How came you to kill Lord Bellasis?" she asked him quietly.

"I had found out from my mother that I was his natural son, and one
day riding home from a pigeon match I told him so. He taunted me--and I
struck him. I did not mean to kill him, but he was an old man, and in my
passion I struck hard. As he fell, I thought I saw a horseman among the
trees, and I galloped off. My ill-luck began then, for the same night I
was arrested at the coiner's."

"But I thought there was robbery," said she.

"Not by me. But, for God's sake, talk no more about it. I am sick--my
brain is going round. I want to sleep."

"Be careful, please! Lift him gently!" said Mrs. Carr, as the boat
ranged alongside the Dido, gaunt and grim, in the early dawn of a bleak
May morning.

"What's the matter?" asked the officer of the watch, perceiving the
bustle in the boat.

"Gentleman seems to have had a stroke," said a boatman.

It was so. There was no fear that John Rex would escape again from the
woman he had deceived. The infernal genius of Sarah Purfoy had saved
her lover at last--but saved him only that she might nurse him till he
died--died ignorant even of her tenderness, a mere animal, lacking the
intellect he had in his selfish wickedness abused.

CHAPTER XVII. THE REDEMPTION.