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"It's a very extraordinary thing, we two coming together like this," she said with conviction. "You coming in without knowing I was here and then telling me that you can't very well go out of the room. That sounds funny.  I wouldn't have been angry if you had said that you wouldn't.  It would have hurt me.  But nobody ever paid much attention to my feelings.  Why do you smile like this?"

"At a thought. Without any charlatanism of passion I am able to tell you of something to match your devotion.  I was not afraid for your sake to come within a hair's breadth of what to all the world would have been a squalid crime.  Note that you and I are persons of honour.  And there might have been a criminal trial at the end of it for me.  Perhaps the scaffold."

"Do you say these horrors to make me tremble?"

"Oh, you needn't tremble. There shall be no crime.  I need not risk the scaffold, since now you are safe.  But I entered this room meditating resolutely on the ways of murder, calculating possibilities and chances without the slightest compunction.  It's all over now.  It was all over directly I saw you here, but it had been so near that I shudder yet."

She must have been very startled because for a time she couldn't speak. Then in a faint voice:

"For me! For me!" she faltered out twice.

"For you--or for myself? Yet it couldn't have been selfish.  What would it have been to me that you remained in the world?  I never expected to see you again.  I even composed a most beautiful letter of farewell.  Such a letter as no woman had ever received."

Instantly she shot out a hand towards me. The edges