trappings, with an
air of somber resolution. So I saw him pass the lone, gray house
fronts, and be swallowed up in the great entrance of the prison.

CHAPTER XI

THE LUGGER

As he disappeared the desire to run after him, to cry out to him, to
cry out to all the ears of the court the story he had told me, rushed
over me, an insane impulse. "What would that do but make everything
worse, even harder for him to bear? Haven't I made things hard enough
for him already?" I who had said I loved him, that I believed in his
innocence, had yet virtuously urged him to go back and give himself
up--to what? Why, my poor little coward mind was even afraid to name
what that thing was!

The Spanish Woman had not been afraid, no, not of anything! She had
risked everything that she had to save him in the best way that she
knew. Was I, as she had so bitterly told me, only a creature of words
with no deeds to make them good? It was all very well to say things
would turn out right; but now I saw that they would not unless I made
them; and how was that to be managed if he wouldn't speak, and I was in
his confidence and couldn't?

I puzzled it over as my carriage rattled slowly back up Montgomery
Avenue. Suddenly from what had been absolutely sterile cogitation,
there sprang up the full flower of an idea. All that he had said that
evening had carried the same perplexing undercurrent of a thing that he
could not speak of, and always it seemed to point to the Spanish Woman.
"She knows!" I thought triumphantly, "and if she knows, why, she must
not go away until she has told me." The whole thing opened before me
complete, unexpected, a deliverance.

I looked out of the window. Faintest, earliest dawn was already
beginning. There was but one thing to do. Johnny had told me that the
Spanish Woman was going aboard the lugger at dawn. I directed the
driver to drive to the Black Point wharf.

He peered at me as if he thought me crazy. "That feller gave me a gold
piece, ye know," he said, "or I wouldn't have taken ye as far as this."

"Go on," I said, and queerly enough I didn't feel at all afraid of the
man. "Go on, and my father, Mr. Fenwick, will give you more when you
take me home; and besides you are doing a service for the city."

Muttering that it was the weirdest go that he had ever struck, he
clucked to the weary horses, and after a little more of cobblestones,
began the struggle through the sand.

Those terr