vellous
arrangement. It works automatically, and, when you look at it, the
perfection makes you sick; which for a mere mechanism is no mean
triumph. Sick and scared. It had nearly scared that poor girl to her
death. Fancy having to take such a thing by the hand! Now I understood
the remorseful strain I had detected in her speeches.

"By Jove!" I said. "They are about to let him out! I never thought of
that."

Fyne was contemptuous either of me or of things at large.

"You didn't suppose he was to be kept in jail for life?"

At that moment I caught sight of Flora de Barral at the junction of the
two streets. Then some vehicles following each other in quick
succession hid from my sight the black slight figure with just a touch
of colour in her hat. She was walking slowly; and it might have been
caution or reluctance. While listening to Fyne I stared hard past his
shoulder trying to catch sight of her again. He was going on with
positive heat, the rags of his solemnity dropping off him at every
second sentence.

That was just it. His wife and he had been perfectly aware of it. Of
course the girl never talked of her father with Mrs Fyne. I suppose
with her theory of innocence she found it difficult. But she must have
been thinking of it day and night. What to do with him? Where to go?
How to keep body and soul together? He had never made any friends. The
only relations were the atrocious East-End cousins. We know what they
were. Nothing but wretchedness, whichever way she turned in an unjust
and prejudiced world. And to look at him helplessly she felt would be
too much for her.

I won't say I was thinking these thoughts. It was not necessary. This
complete knowledge was in my head while I stared hard across the wide
road, so hard that I failed to hear little Fyne till he raised his deep
voice indignantly.

"I don't blame the girl," he was saying. "He is infatuated with her.
Anybody can see that. Why she should have got such a hold on him I
can't understand. She said `Yes' to him only for the sake of that
fatuous, swindling father of hers. It's perfectly plain if one thinks
it over a moment. One needn't even think of it. We have it under her
own hand. In that letter to my wife she says she has acted
unscrupulously. She has owned up, then, for what else can it mean, I
should like to know. And so they are to be married before that old
idiot comes out.--He will be surprised," commented