“Either the Preface or—­the Finis,” said Cleek, with a deeply drawn breath.  “Still, as you say, no atonement is worth calling an atonement if it is based upon fraud; and so—­Miss Lorne, I am going to ask you to indulge in yet another little flight of fancy.  Carry your mind back, will you, to the night when your cousin—­to the night two years ago when Sir Horace Wyvern’s daughter had her wedding presents stolen and you, I believe, had rather a trying moment with that fellow who was known as ‘The Vanishing Cracksman.’  You can remember it, can you not?”

“Remember it?  I shall never forget it.  I thought, when the police ran down stairs and left me with him, that I was talking to Mr. Narkom.  I think I nearly went daft with terror when I found out that it was he.”

“And you found it out only through his telling you, did you not?  Afterward, I am told, the police found you lying fainting at the foot of the stairs.  The man had touched you, spoken to you, even caught up your hand and put it to his lips?  Can you remember what he said when he did that?  Can you?”

“Yes,” she answered, with a little shudder of recollection.  “For weeks afterward I used to wake up in the middle of the night thinking of it and going cold all over.  He said, ’You have come down into Hell and lifted me out.  Under God, you shall lift me into Heaven as well!’”

“And perhaps you shall,” said Cleek, stopping short and uncovering his head.  “At any rate, I’ll not attempt to win it by fraud.  Miss Lorne, I am that man.  I am the ‘Vanishing Cracksman’ of those other days.  I’ve walked the ‘straight path’ since the moment I kissed your hand.”

She said nothing, made no faintest sound.  She couldn’t—­all the strength, all the power to do anything but simply stand and look at him had gone out of her.  But even so, she was conscious—­dimly but yet conscious—­of a feeling of relief that they had come at last close to the end of the heath, that there was the faint glow of lights dimly observable through the enfolding mist, and that there was the rumble of wheels, the pulse of life, the law-guarded paths of the city’s streets beyond.

CHAPTER III

She could not herself have been more conscious of that feeling of relief than he was of its coming.  It spoke to him in the swift glance she gave toward those distant, fog-blurred lights, in the white, drained face of her, in the shrinking backward movement of her body when he spoke again; and something within him voiced “the exceeding bitter cry.”

“I am not sure that I even hoped you would take the revelation in any other way than this,” he said.  “A hawk—­even a tamed one—­must be a thing of terror in the eyes of a dove.  Still, I am not sorry that I have made the confession, Miss Lorne.  When the worst has been told, a burden rolls away.”

“Yes,” she acquiesced faintly, finding her voice; but finding it only to lose it again.  “But that you—­that you....”  And was faint and very still again.