And Sisily?  There was anguish in that thought.

CHAPTER XXXI

With a beating heart Sisily gained the shelter of her room and locked the door, her eyes glancing quickly around her.  She did not expect to see anything there, but she had reached the stage of instinctive terror when one fears lurking shadows, unexpected noises, or an imagined alteration in the contour of familiar things.  There was nothing in the room to alarm her, and her thoughts flew back to the face of the man she had seen in the street outside.  The owner of the face had leered at first, and then his glance hardened into suspicion as he looked.  When she hurried past him he had shifted his position to stare at her by the light of the street lamp.  Had he followed her?  That was the question she could not answer.  She had heard footsteps behind her in the dark street, horrible stealthy footsteps which had caused terror to rush over her like a flood, and sent her flying along the street to her one haven.  As she ran she had felt a touching faith in the security of her room, if she could reach it.  Out there, in the open street, it had seemed impregnable, like a fortress.

Now as she sat there she had a revulsion of feeling.  The room was not safe, the house was not safe.  Not now.  She had been very imprudent.  She had run straight home to her hiding-place, her only refuge.  Why had she not waited to make sure that she was followed?  Then she could have slipped away in a different direction until she had evaded pursuit, and returned to her room afterwards.  She had been very foolish.

She approached her window and gazed down, but could discern nothing in the darkness.  She tried to shake off her fear, telling herself that it was imagination.  But her mind remained full of misgivings, and her inner consciousness peopled the obscurity of the street below with lurking figures.

Weariness overcame her.  She retired from the window and laid down on her bed, not to sleep, but to think.  Her fright had turned her mind temporarily from the contemplation of a greater disaster.  That was the arrest of Charles Turold.  She had learnt the news from an evening paper which she had bought at the corner of the street.  The announcement was very brief, merely stating that he had been arrested in Cornwall.  The guarded significance of the information was not lost upon her.  Charles had been captured on his way back to her, and her agonized heart whispered that she was responsible for his fate.

Bitterly she now blamed herself for having let him go on the quest.  She hardly asked herself whether it had succeeded or failed, perhaps because she had subconsciously accepted the view that Thalassa, after all, had nothing to tell.  Nor did she think of the calamity which had again overtaken her love.  The effect of her original renunciation was still strong within her, and Charles’s discovery of her and her promise to him had not really altered her attitude.  His finding her, and their subsequent conversation in the room below, bore an air of the strangest unreality to her, as if she had been merely an actor in a stirring scene which did not actually affect her.  Some subtle inward voice told her that these things did not matter to her.