What she did do was to make a feeble effort to save her daughter from the consequences of her own unhappy act, or at least to help her if those results arose.  She had whispered a name, the name of an old friend of her girlhood who would befriend her child if ever she needed help.  At her urgent request Sisily had propped her up in bed while she wrote down the address.  Having performed this feat with infinite labour, she dropped back on her pillow, clinging fast to the hand of the child she loved and whose future she had blasted at the command of conscience.

Charles recalled how Sisily had taken that pathetic little scrap of paper from her blouse, kissed it with quivering lips, and handed it to him in silence.  He had deciphered the pencilled scrawl with difficulty.  The name was Catherine Pursill, Charleswood, Surrey.  It remained in his mind for a special reason.  Sisily was afraid she might lose the paper (perhaps, like her mother, she had some prescience of the future) and he had endeavoured to divert her thoughts by making “memory pictures” of the name and address after the method of a thought reader.  He had told her to picture a cat sitting on a window ledge, and that would fix the name in her mind.  “Purr”—­“Sill”—­there it was!  As for the place, it was only necessary to imagine him wandering in a wood (he slyly suggested it)—­Charleswood, and there they were again!

Sisily had smiled wanly at these “memory pictures” and said she would always be able to remember the address of her mother’s old friend by their means.

They were effectual enough in his own case.  The grotesque association of ideas brought the address to his mind when he first thought of seeking Sisily in London.  He decided to go to Charleswood as soon as he reached there.  The dying woman seemed quite certain her old friend was still in Charleswood, although it was twenty years since she had heard from her.  She had told Sisily that Mrs. Pursill’s house was her own, and it had belonged to her parents before her.  She had assumed that she was not likely to move.  The possibility that Death might have moved her without consulting her convenience did not seem to have occurred to her.

It did to Charles Turold though, on his journey up from Cornwall.  But he thrust the chilling thought resolutely from him, clinging to his slight clue because he had nothing else to sustain him, building such hopes upon it that by the time he reached London scarcely a doubt remained.  He spent the last hour of his journey picturing his meeting with the runaway girl, holding her, kissing her, sheltering her in his arms from the world.  And afterwards?  He refused to contemplate what was to happen afterwards, and how he was to shield her from the unsentimental clutch of the law which was also seeking her.  He declined also to allow his thoughts to dwell upon his own position, which was invidious and threatening enough in all conscience for a man setting out to be the buckler and shield of a girl in Sisily’s plight.  He put these obtrusive contingencies out of his mind.  Time enough for those bitter reflections afterwards.  The great thing was to find Sisily first, before shaping further action.  So he reasoned, with the single purpose of a man mastered by love, and the desperate instinct of a reckless temperament which gambled with life, never looking beyond the next throw.