“God knows!” Philip groaned.  “There’s the whole ghastly truth there, if fortune helped him, and he were clever enough, if by any devilish chance the threads came into his hand.  I don’t think—­I don’t think there was ever any fear from the other side.  I had all the luck.  But, Elizabeth, sometimes I am terrified of this man Dane.  I didn’t mean to tell you this, but it’s too late now.  Do you know that I am watched, day by day?  I pretend not to notice it—­I am even able, now and then, to shut it out from my own thoughts—­but wherever I go there’s some one shadowing me, some one walking in my footsteps.  I’m perfectly certain that if you were to go to police headquarters here, you could find out where I have spent almost every hour since I took that room in Monmouth House.”

She gripped his fingers fiercely.

“Philip!  Philip!”

He leaned forward, gazing with peculiar, almost passionate intentness, into the faces of the people as they swept along Broadway.

“Look at them, Elizabeth!” he muttered.  “Look at that mob of men and women sweeping along the pavements there, every kind and shape of man, every nationality, every age!  They are like the little flecks on the top of a wave.  I watched them when I first came and I felt almost reckless.  You’d think a man could plunge in there and be lost, wouldn’t you?  He can’t!  I tried it.  Is there anywhere else in the world, I wonder?  Is there anywhere in the living world where one can throw off everything of the past, where one can take up a new life, and memory doesn’t come?”

She shook her head.  She was more composed now.  The moment of feverish excitement had passed.  Her shrewd and level common sense had begun to reassert itself.

“There isn’t any such place, Philip,” she told him, “and if there were it wouldn’t be worth while your trying to find it.  We are both a little hysterical this evening.  We’ve lost our sense of proportion.  You’ve played for your stake.  You mustn’t quail; if the worst should come, you must brave it out.  I believe, even then, you would be safe.  But it won’t come—­it shan’t!”

He gripped her hands.  They were slowing up now, caught in a maze of heavy traffic a few blocks from the theatre.  His voice was firm.  He had regained his self-control.

“What an idiot I have been!” he exclaimed scornfully.  “Never mind, that’s past.  There is just one more serious word, though, dear.”

She responded immediately to the change in his manner, and smiled into his face.

“Well?”

“My only real problem,” he went on earnestly, “is this.  Dare I hold you to your word, Elizabeth?  Dare I, for instance, say ‘yes’ to the wonderful suggestion of yours?—­make you my wife and risk having people look at you in years to come, point at you with pity and say that you married a murderer who died a shameful death!  Fancy how the tragedy of that would lie across your life—­you who are so wonderful and so courted and so clever!”