t know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a
bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he could
trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature
evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, he
thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of
impulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modern
apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far from
impossible; it only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, his
soul drugged with the vapors of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan and
perform such a deed.

A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason
away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been
intended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth after
the thing was done, he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in
his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly
put had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the
pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery.
In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her;
and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlowe
since. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at his word
to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.

But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was
brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She might
have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she was
aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget that
his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by
the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time,
when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the
idea of her equal guilt and her cooeperation. He had figured to himself
some passionate _hysterique_, merciless as a tiger in her hate and her
love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.

Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her
weakness; 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