"I see nothing else for it. The man has practically confessed."

But this Colonel Harris would not admit, and so the two men parted.
Louisa's father, thinking a great deal of his friend but still more of
his daughter, wanted above all things to have a final talk with Luke.

Louisa in the meanwhile sat silent in the corner of the cab.

She was trying to visualize this new picture: Luke--a fugitive from
justice!

The taxicab was making a slight detour as Whitehall and the Mall were
closed for road repairs. The chauffeur was driving round by St.
Martin's Lane. At one of the theatres there, a popular play was
filling the house night after night with enthusiastic crowds. It was
only half past six now, and in a long queue extending over two hundred
yards away from the pit and gallery doors of the lucky playhouse,
patient crowds waited for the evening's pleasure.

People were going to theatres, they laughed at farces, and wept at
tragedies. Was there ever such a tragedy enacted inside a theatre, as
now took place in the life of a commonplace man and woman?

Luke--a fugitive from justice! Money and influence could do much! They
could enable a wealthy criminal to escape the consequences of his own
crime! They could enable him to catch express trains unmolested, to
fly across land and sea under cover of the night, to become,
Cain-like, a wanderer on the face of the earth without rest and
without peace.

Could they prevent him from seeing ever present at his elbow the grim
Angel of Remorse, holding in one hand the glass wherein relentlessly
flowed the sands of time, and in the other, the invisible sword of a
retarded but none the less sure vengeance? Could they prevent his
hearing the one word, Nemesis?

Luke--a fugitive from justice! Accused of a crime which he did not
commit, self-convicted, almost self-accused, and fleeing from its
consequences as he would from Remorse!

And people went to theatres, and laughed and cried. People ate and
danced and sang. News vendors shrieked their wares, the latest
sensational news; the gentleman criminal who had money and influence
and with their help evaded the grip of justice.

CHAPTER XXXII

A MAN MUST ACT AS HE THINKS BEST

Louisa knew the flat in Exhibition Road very well. She had helped Edie
to furnish it, and to make it pretty and cosey, for Edie's passion was
for dogs and for golf; drawing-room chairs and saucepans were not much
in her line. So Louisa had cho