His dark face was close to hers, and his keen blue eyes seemed to probe the recesses of her soul.  If she answered, would the steel springs of some trap close upon her?

“I did not go back to ‘Elm Bluff.’  My hands, my heart, my soul are as free from crime as they were when God sent them into the world.  I am innocent—­innocent—­innocent as any baby only a week old, lying dead in its little coffin.  Innocent—­but defiled, disgraced; innocent as the Lord Jesus was of the sins for which He died; but you can not save what you have destroyed.  You have ruined my life.”

He was a strong man, cold, collected, priding himself upon his superb physique, his nerves of steel; but as he watched and listened, he trembled, and the girl’s eyes dilated, sparkled through the sudden moisture that so strangely and unexpectedly gathered in his own.

“Then you must prove the truth of your solemn words; and it was this faint hope that induced me to come here to-day.  Only one circumstance stands between the Grand Jury and your indictment for murder; and time presses.  Now tell me, do you know this?”

He took from his coat pocket a small parcel wrapped in paper, and tore off the covering.  Beryl stood faint and dizzy, resting against the window, but erect, on guard and defiant.  He shook out and held up a square of fine linen, daintily hem-stitched.  Along the border ran graceful arabesques, swelling into scallops and dotted with stars, embroidered in some rich red thread; and in one corner, enclosed in a wreath of exquisitely designed fuchsias, the large, elaborately ornate capitals “B.  B.” were worked in fadeless scarlet scrolls to match the wreath.  Above the drooping flowers, poised the red wings of a descending butterfly.  Artistic instincts had outlined, and deft delicate touches filled in, with the glowing embroidery.

Did she know it?  Could she ever forget that serene May day when the air was liquid gold, and the Mediterranean molten sapphire, wreathed with pearls, as the wavelets crested; when the rosy oleanders and silvery flakes of orange blossoms floated down upon the ferny cliff, where sitting by her father’s side, she had drawn this design, spreading the linen on the back of her father’s worn copy of Theocritus?  If she lived a thousand years, would it be possible to forget the thin, almost transparent white hand, with its blue veins swollen like cords, which had gently taken the pencil from her fingers, and retouched and rounded the sweep of the curves; the dear wasted hand that she had stooped and kissed, as it corrected her work?

As on the golden background of a cherished Byzantine picture, memory held untarnished every tint and outline of that blessed day, when she and her father had looked for the last time on the sunny sea they loved so well.

Did fell fate hover, even then, in that sparkling perfumed air, and in sinister prescience trace this tangling web of threads, with grim intent to snare her unwary feet?