“And have you no remorse at betraying their confidence?”

She shook her head.  “Most of them,” she declared, “are very well pleased to think you’ve got away; and even if they weren’t I should never feel remorse for helping any one to evade the law.”

“You seem to have a great objection to the law.”

“Well, haven’t you?”

“Yes; but in my case it’s comprehensible.”

“So it is in mine—­if you only knew.”

“Perhaps,” he said, looking at her steadily, “this is as good a time as any to assure you that the law has done me wrong.”

He waited for her to say something; but as she stroked Micmac’s head in silence, he continued.

“I never committed the crime of which they found me guilty.”

He waited again for some intimation of her confidence.

“Their string of circumstantial evidence was plausible enough, I admit.  The only weak point about it was that it wasn’t true.”

Even through the obscurity of his refuge he could feel the suspension of expression in her bearing, and could imagine it bringing a kind of eclipse over her eyes.

“He was very cruel to you—­your uncle?—­wasn’t he?” she asked, at last.

“He was very cantankerous; but that wouldn’t be a reason for shooting him in his sleep—­whatever I may have said when in a rage.”

“I should think it might be.”

He started.  If it were not for the necessity of making no noise he would have laughed.

“Are you so bloodthirsty—?” he began.

“Oh no, I’m not; but I should think it is what a man would do.  My father wouldn’t have submitted to it.  I know he killed one man; and he may have killed two or three.”

Ford whistled under his breath.

“So that,” he said, after a pause, “your objection to the law is—­hereditary.”

“My objection to the law is because it is unjust.  The world is full of injustice,” she added, indignantly, “and the laws men live by create it.”

“And your aim is to defeat them?”

“I can’t talk any more now,” she said, reverting to an explanatory tone of voice.  “I must go.  I’ve arranged everything for you for the day.  If you are very quiet you can sit in the studio and read; but you mustn’t look out at the window, or even draw back the curtain.  If you hear a step outside, you must creep in here and shut the door.  And you needn’t be impatient; because I’m going to spend the day working out a plan for your escape.”

But when she appeared next morning she declined to give details of the plan she had in mind.  She preferred to work it out alone, she said, and give him the outlines only when she had settled them.  It chanced to be a day of drenching summer rain, and Ford, with a renewed effort to get some clew to her identity, expressed his surprise that she should have been allowed to venture out.

“Oh, no one worries about what I do,” she said, indifferently “I go about as I choose.”