"I
am going to do to-night what I often have to do in the course of my
work. I am going to borrow your soul and your mind and allow them to
speak through my lips. When I go up stairs, I shall only outwardly be
the police officer searching for proofs of a crime: inwardly I shall
be a noble-hearted woman trying to discover proofs of her fiancee's
innocence. That will be right, dear, won't it?"

She nodded acquiescence, trying to appear content. Then she pleaded
once again, dry-eyed and broken-voiced: "You will try and get
permission for me to see Lord Radclyffe, won't you?"

"I give you my word," he said solemnly.

Then he went up stairs.

Mr. Warren, quiet and sympathetic, persuaded Louisa to sit down again
by the hearth. He took her muff and fur stole from her, and threw a
log on the fire. The flames spurted off, giving a cheerful crackle.
But Louisa saw no pictures in this fire, her mind was up stairs in
Lord Radclyffe's room, wondering what was happening.

Mr. Warren spoke of the murdered man. He had not been present at the
inquest, and the news that the tyrant who had ruled over Lord
Radclyffe for so long was nothing but an impostor came as a fearful
shock to him.

There was the pitifulness of the whole thing! The utter
purposelessness of a hideous crime. So many lives wrecked, such awful
calamity, such appalling humiliation, such ignominy, and all just for
nothing! A very little trouble, almost superficial inquiry, would have
revealed the imposture, and saved all that sorrow, all the dire
humiliation, and prevented the crime for which the law of men decrees
that there shall be no pardon.

The man who lay ill up stairs--and he who was lying in the public
mortuary, surrounded by all the pomp and luxury which he had filched
by his lies--alone could tell the secret of the extraordinary success
of the imposture. Lord Radclyffe had accepted the bricklayer's son
almost as his own, with that same obstinate reserve with which he had
at first flouted the very thought of the man's pretensions. Who could
tell what persuasion was used? what arguments? what threats?

And the man was an impostor after all! And he had been murdered, when
one word perhaps would have effaced him from the world as completely
and less majestically than had been done by death.

Mr. Warren talked of it all, and Louisa listened with half an ear even
whilst every sense of hearing in her was concentrated on the floor
above, in a vain endeavour t