“Well, but what reason can you have for supposing that this man was Mr. Dudley Horne?”

“Once I saw his face,” answered Carrie.

“And you think it was the face of this man here beside you?”

Max struck a light and held it over the face of the unconscious Dudley.  Carrie looked at him steadily.

“Well,” she said at last, “it did look like him, that’s all I can say.”

Max frowned uneasily.  But after a few moments a new thought struck him, and he turned to her sharply.  The match he had struck had burned itself out, and they were again in darkness.

“If Mrs. Higgs was only a tool in his hands, as you suggest, for some mysterious purposes which nobody can understand or guess at, how do you account for her trying to drown him?”

“They must have quarreled,” said Carrie, quickly.  Then, instantly perceiving that she had made an admission, she added:  “That is, supposing she had anything to do with it.”

“Amiable old lady!” exclaimed Max.

The mystery of the whole affair hung over both him and Carrie like a pall; and the long night-drive seemed never-ending in the death-like silence.  Max tried from time to time to break it, but Carrie grew more reserved as the hours went by, until her curt answers ceased altogether.

Then, when dawn came, the dull dawn of a foggy morning, and the carriage drew up at the hotel in Chatham where they were to change horses, Max discovered that she was asleep.

Dudley opened his eyes when the carriage stopped, but shut them again without a word to Max, who asked him how he felt.

Max, when the people of the hotel had been roused, succeeded in borrowing a rug, which he wrapped gently round Carrie, without waking her.  And presently the carriage jogged on again on its journey, and the morning sun began to pierce the mist as the bare Kentish hop-fields and orchards were reached.

Max leaned forward and looked at Carrie’s sweet face with infinite tenderness.  Now in her sleep she looked like a child, with her lips slightly parted and her eyelashes sweeping her thin, white cheeks.  The alert look of the Londoner, which gave an expression of premature shrewdness to her waking face, had disappeared under the relaxing influence of slumber.  She looked pitifully helpless, sad and weak, as her tired, worn-out little body leaned back in the corner of the carriage.

Max looked at her with yearning in his eyes.  This young ne’er-do-weel, as his father called him, had enjoyed the privilege of his type in being a great favorite with women.  As usual in such cases, he had repaid their kindness with ingratitude, and had had numerous flirtations without ever experiencing a feeling either deep or lasting.

Now, for the first time, in this beautiful waif of the big city he had found a mixture of warmth and coldness, of straightforward simplicity and boldness, which opened his eyes as to there being in her sex an attraction he had previously denied.  He felt as he looked at her that he wanted her; that he could not go away and forget her in the presence of the next pretty face he happened to see.