over the leaves of a magazine, when a loud remark by one of the speakers startled her into an attitude of listening fear.  “Have you read about this Cornwall murder?” The words, cold and distinct, had broken into her sad reflections like a stone dropped from a great height.  They had gone on talking without looking at her, and she had listened intently, masking her conscious features with the open magazine.  It was well that she did.  They discussed the murder in animated tones.  The strangest case! ...  A great title ... the Turrald title ... to be heard before the House of Lords next week ... and now the claimant was murdered ... he was very wealthy, too.  Thus they talked; then the first voice, which seemed to dominate all the others, broke in:  “It was thought to be suicide at first, but I see by tonight’s paper that his daughter is suspected.  She has disappeared, and is supposed to have fled to London.  What are girls coming to—­always shooting somebody or somebody shooting them!  It’s the war, I suppose....”

The shock of that double disclosure had been almost too much to bear.  Till then she had not known that her father had been murdered, much less that she was suspected of killing him.  Dizziness had swept over her.  Things seemed to spin round her, yet she saw them rotating with a kind of dreadful distinctness—­the false smiling faces of the women, the furniture, a cat blinking on the hearthrug, an empty coffee cup on a small table.  One stout lady, enthroned on a pile of red and blue cushions, sailed round and round on a sofa with the preposterous repetition and tragic reality of a fat woman on a roundabout.  Then the circling faces and furniture vanished.  She swayed with the sensation of growing darkness, and had the oddest fancy that the break of the waves on Cornish cliffs was sounding in her ears.  She was dreamily inhaling the sea air....

She had pulled herself sharply together.  She had something of her father’s tenacity and courage in her composition, and that had nerved her to face the ordeal and saved her from giving herself away.  The darkness lightened, the electric lights danced dizzily back into view, and the room became stationary once more.  With an effort at calmness she rose from her seat and sought her room, and next morning she left the house.  Henceforth her lot was one of furtive movement and concealment.

As she lay there, staring open-eyed into the darkness, her thoughts slipped back to the night of her visit to Flint House in a vain effort to recollect some overlooked incident which might throw light on her father’s mysterious death.  There was one thing over which she had frequently puzzled without arriving at any interpretation of it.  She thought of it now.  She saw herself stealing from her father’s room with the sound of his last awful words ringing through her being.  Beneath, near the foot of the staircase, she could see Thalassa waiting, the glow of the tiny hall light falling on his stern listening face.  She was walking along the passage to go to him when some impulse impelled her to glance through a window which looked out on the moors and the rocks near the house.