He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the “Sentinel” had first shaken the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring head-lines, “Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,” ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it.  The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England.  It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom.  As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down—­” she heard Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait.  It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim.  Where had she seen that outline before?  She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears.  Then she gave a cry.

“This is the man—­the man who came for my husband!”

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm.  With an intense effort she straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

“It’s the man!  I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled windings.

“Mrs. Boyne, you’re not very well.  Shall I call somebody?  Shall I get a glass of water?”

“No, no, no!” She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically clenching the newspaper.  “I tell you, it’s the man!  I know him!  He spoke to me in the garden!”

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait.  “It can’t be, Mrs. Boyne.  It’s Robert Elwell.”

“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space.  “Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.”

“Came for Boyne?  The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose.  He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat.  “Why, Elwell was dead!  Don’t you remember?”

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.

“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me—­the one you found on his desk that day?  It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.”  She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice.  “Surely you remember that!” he urged her.