Hugo nearly leapt from his chair.

'Is it possible, Mrs. Tudor,' he asked her eagerly, 'that you are not
aware that in actual practice a reasonably well-behaved prisoner never
serves the full period of his sentence? Marks for good conduct are
allowed, and each mark means so many days deducted from the term.'

'I didn't know,' said Camilla simply. 'How should I know a thing like
that?'

'I have no doubt that young Powitt is already free. And if he is--'

'You think that Mr. Ravengar's suicide may not have been a suicide?'

Hugo hesitated.

'Yes,' he said, and lapsed into reflection.

* * * * *

'I shall see you home,' he said.

'I am going to walk,' she replied. 'And I have to get my things from the
cloak-room.'

'I will walk with you,' he said.

'What style the woman has!' he thought, enraptured.

They proceeded southwards in silence. Then suddenly she asked how he had
left Mr. Darcy, and they began to talk about Darcy and Paris. Hugo
encouraged her. He wished to know the worst.

'Except my father,' she said, 'I have never met anyone with more sense
than Mr. Darcy, or anyone more kind. I might have been dead now if it
hadn't been for Mr. Darcy.'

'Mr. Darcy is a very decent fellow,' Hugo remarked experimentally.

She turned and gave him a look. No, it was not a look; it was the merest
fraction of a look, but it withered him up.

'She loves him!' he thought. 'And what's more, if she hadn't made up her
mind to marry him, she wouldn't be so precious easy and facile and
friendly with me. I might have guessed that.'

They passed Victoria Station, and came into Horseferry Road. She had
informed him that she had taken a furnished room in Horseferry Road. The
high and sinister houses appeared unspeakably and disgracefully mean to
him in the wintry gloom of the gaslights. She halted before a tenement
that seemed even more odious than its neighbours. Was it possible that
she should exist in such a quarter? The idea sickened him.

'Which floor?' he questioned.

'Oh,' she laughed, 'the top, the fifth. Good-night, Mr. Hugo.'

He pictured the mean and frowsy room, and shuddered. Yet what could he
do? What right had he to interfere, to criticise, to ameliorate?

'Good-night,' she repeated, and in a moment she had opened the door with
a latchkey and disappeared. He stood staring at the door. He had by no
means finished saying all that he meant to say to her. He must talk to
her