'But she is alive all the same!' Ravengar persisted. 'It is the fact
that she is not dead that makes me less unwilling to die, for a word
from her might send me to a death more shameful than the one you have so
kindly arranged for me.'

Hugo in that instant admired Ravengar, and he replied quite gently:

'You are mistaken. Where can you have got the idea that she is not dead?
She is dead. I myself--I myself screwed her up in her coffin.'

The words sounded horrible.

'Then you were in the plot!' Ravengar cried.

'What plot?'

'The plot to persuade me falsely that she is dead. Bah! I know more
than you think. I know, for example, that her body is not in the coffin
in Brompton Cemetery. And I am almost sure that I know where she is
hiding. I should have known beyond doubt before to-morrow morning.
However, what does it matter now?'

'Not in the coffin?' Hugo whispered, as if to himself. His whole frame
trembled, shook, and his heart, leaping, defied his intellect.

CHAPTER XVI

BURGLARS

When at eleven o'clock that same winter night Hugo stood hesitating,
with certain tools and a hooded electric lamp in his hand, on the
balcony in front of the drawing-room window of Francis Tudor's sealed
flat, he thought what a strange, illogical, and capricious thing is the
human heart.

He knew that Camilla was dead. He had had the very best and most
convincing evidence of the fact. He knew that Ravengar's suspicions were
without foundation, utterly wrong-headed; and yet those statements of
his enemy had unsettled him. They had not unsettled the belief of his
intelligence, but they had unsettled his soul's peace. And that
curiosity to learn the whole truth about the history of the relations
between Francis Tudor and Camilla, that curiosity which had slumbered
for months, and which had been so suddenly awakened by Ravengar's lure
of the morning, was now urged into a violent activity.

Nor was this all. Camilla was surely dead. But supposing that by some
incredible chance she was not dead (lo! the human heart), could he kill
Ravengar? This question had presented itself to him as he sat in the
dome listening to Ravengar's asseverations that Camilla lived. And the
mere ridiculous, groundless suspicion that she lived, the mere fanciful
dream that she lived, had quite changed and softened Hugo's mood. He had
struggled hard to keep his resolution to kill Ravengar, but it had
melted away; he had fanned the fire of his