The room was very still; even the clock upon the mantelpiece was not going, so that not even a low tick disturbed the perfect quiet. It was a sitting-room in one of the Liverpool hotels, and quite alone in it was Clemence. She was sitting near the window, motionless, her hands clasped tightly together on her knee. Her face was lifted slightly towards the sky, and its calm, broken now and again by a slight quiver of the lips, was that of intense absorption. Clemence’s was one of those natures in which great mental suffering of any kind passes instinctively into unformed prayer; and she was praying now with her whole being, with no faintest consciousness of herself or her mental attitude.

She had been sitting there alone and motionless for more than an hour, when a touch fell upon the handle of the door. She started violently, and rose involuntarily to her feet as it opened to admit Falconer. She did not speak; all her agony of questioning seemed to have passed into the eyes she fixed upon him, and into those tightly-clasped hands.

Falconer crossed the room quickly to her, and spoke as though in answer to audible words.

“I have found him!” he said. “There has been some delay. The boat will not leave until to-morrow, and till then he is here.”

A breath of unutterable relief and thanksgiving broke from Clemence’s white lips, and she let her face fall forward for a moment on her hands. Then she lifted it again, tremulous and shaken. “Is it—right—that he should go?” she said.

“It is necessary!” returned Falconer sternly. But the sternness was not for her.

A look of trouble and perplexity passed into her face; her lips were parted to speak again when a door at the other end of the room opened sharply—not the door by which Falconer had entered, but a second, leading, presumably, into a bedroom—and Mrs. Romayne appeared. The rigidity of her self-control had given place, apparently, to a consuming fever. Her eyes were glittering, the dry skin seemed to be too tightly drawn across her sharpened features. There was no paint upon her now—no mask, less tangible but no less effective, of artificiality of expression. It was the very woman, stripped of all the trappings of her life, bearing the ravages of past struggles thick upon her, driven to bay, and braced to hold the struggle on which she was entering with the last breath in her body. She was still dressed for walking, and the contrast between the smart, somewhat youthful, apparel which she had always affected, and her face, was terrible to see.

She came straight up to Falconer, utterly unconscious, apparently, as far as feeling and realisation constitute consciousness, of Clemence’s presence. “You have found him?” she said, and the words were less a question than an assertion. “Let us go at once. Stop, though!” she added abruptly, laying a burning hand on Falconer’s arm, as though in the haste and pressure of her own impulses she ascribed a similar impatience to him. “I had better know the facts first. What has he told you?”

Falconer hesitated. His words, when he spoke, ignored her final question, and answered the idea which vibrated behind every word of her speech. He glanced at Clemence as he began to speak as though he wished his words to apply to her also.

“I do not think,” he said, “that anything will be gained by your seeing him—except extreme distress for all concerned. I fear there is nothing to be done!”

He had spoken very firmly, as though the moment had arrived, in his estimation, for that stand on manly judgement which he had involuntarily postponed for so long; and he paused as though to accentuate the weight of his words.

Mrs. Romayne, with a gesture of irrepressible, tortured impatience, but otherwise with no recognition whatever of his having spoken, repeated her question:

“What has he told you?”

Clemence’s eyes, fixed upon Falconer’s face, dilated slightly, and then the shadow of a smile touched her parted lips.

“I fear there is no doubt that it is a bad affair,” continued Falconer. “There are forged documents connected with it, and misappropriation of money fraudulently come by; and detection seems to be inevitable. His only hope of safety lies in flight.”

As though with the very tangibility and imminence of the danger she had come forth to meet Mrs. Romayne’s spirit rose higher, the only sort of change brought to her face by the words was an intensifying of all its previous characteristics of growing courage and determination. From Clemence’s lips the little tremulous light had died, quenched in such a horror of vicarious shame, of pity, love, and anguish unspeakable, as seemed to freeze her where she stood.

“The facts! The facts!” The words came from Mrs. Romayne sharp and tense, seeming to put aside and ignore any extraneous comment or opinion.

Falconer hesitated again for a moment and scanned her face closely, absolutely unconscious of his own incapacity for reading what was written there. So far was he from an adequate conception of the realities of the situation, that he thought that a plain statement of details would crush out for ever the hope of which he was conscious in her. And he decided that such instantaneous crushing was the only mercy he could show her.

Gravely and concisely, with no unnecessary comment, he told her the whole story as he had gathered it half an hour earlier from Julian’s incoherent, despairing words. He finished and paused, holding himself braced for the outbreak of despair which he expected.

His words were followed by a dead silence. His eyes were fixed on Mrs. Romayne with a vague fear for her reason, and he felt rather than saw that Clemence had turned away and was standing with her face hidden in her hands. Mrs. Romayne’s brows had contracted as if in intense thought, and her eyes were extraordinarily bright and keen. At last, with no slightest relaxation of the intent calculation of her face, she asked one or two questions as to details of business procedure, the words coming from her sharp and distinct; questions of which Falconer, as he answered them, tried in vain to see the drift. Then she moved with a gesture of determination, so self-absorbed that it seemed to isolate her utterly.

“Take me to him at once!” she said.

A sharp exclamation broke from Falconer, and, as she moved towards the door, he followed her hastily, indescribably disturbed and confused by so entirely unexpected a course of action.

“To what purpose?” he said quickly. “I beg of you to be advised by me. The boy must go! Nothing can be gained but a parting——”

Mrs. Romayne turned upon him and faced him suddenly.

“I am here to see my son,” she said, and there was something in her voice—rather in what its intense restraint suggested than in its tones themselves—absolutely dominating and conclusive. “You came to help me. Take me to him, or tell me where to find him.”

Intensely annoyed and disapproving; keenly alive to the fear that Julian, so taken by surprise, might impute to him some definitely treacherous intention in withholding, as he had done, the fact that he was not alone; Falconer yet felt himself powerless. He had no shadow of a right to stand between mother and son. He had made his stand, and he might as effectually have opposed himself to the wind. His words, his judgement, were as nothing to her. That he should so far fail to carry into effect his conception of his duty as her escort, as to let her go alone was, of course, impossible in his eyes. He made a sternly unwilling sign to the effect that he would perforce accompany her, and then, as she passed quickly out of the room, he looked at Clemence. There was a stunned look upon her face now; she did not even glance at him in answer, but she moved mechanically, as it seemed, and like a woman walking in her sleep, and followed Mrs. Romayne.

Not one word was spoken by either of the trio until they stood, a quarter of an hour later, before a rather dingy door in a dreary passage of an unpretentious and obscure private hotel. Then Falconer spoke in a low, stern tone.

“Here!” he said, indicating the door before them.

Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly forward and turned the handle. For one instant, as the door opened, there was a vision of a dull, bare little sitting-room, touched with a strange glory by a red ray from the setting sun, which slanted right across it; and in the middle of the room, in the full light of that red ray, which fell with an almost weird effect of irradiation upon his attitude of despair, Julian sitting by the table, his head buried on his outstretched arms. For an instant only the picture was visible; then Julian turned his head sharply and sprang to his feet with a cry. His mother was advancing rapidly towards him, but it was not his mother that he saw. It was the figure behind her with the dazed white face all breaking up now into quivering lines. It was to that figure that he stretched out his hands with the hoarse, heart-broken sob:

“Clemmie! Clemmie! They’ve told you!”

Before the words were uttered, Clemence had rushed past Mrs. Romayne, and was clinging to him in such a sudden agony of sobs and tears as seemed to rend her very heart.

Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly. Falconer, who was close to her with his back to the door which he had shut swiftly on Julian’s cry, saw a spasm of pain cut across the concentration of her face for an instant; and in the flash of anger and impatience which succeeded it, she seemed to recognise Clemence’s presence practically for the first time. She fell back a step or two, waiting with contemptuous self-control, her eyes fixed upon the pair before her as they clung together, and Julian tried brokenly and despairingly to soothe the pitiful abandonment of grief with which Clemence was shaken. His own distress increased with every incoherent word of self-reproach he uttered; and it was a sense of his anguish that seemed, at last, to reach Clemence, and produce in her a woman’s instinct towards the suppression of her own pain. She disengaged herself gently, forcing back the heavy sob that trembled on her lips, and looked from Julian towards Mrs. Romayne with a tacit recognition of his mother’s claims which was as beautiful as it was instinctive.

“You will listen!” she said in a choked, beseeching voice, “you will listen and come back!”

She turned away as she spoke, making him a sign that he should not speak to her; and as she drew away from him Mrs. Romayne advanced rapidly, every movement, every line of her face, every tone of her voice, claiming as an inalienable right her son’s attention. Her face was very hard, far harder than it had been before that spasm of pain had shaken it, and there was no touch of emotion in her hard, quick voice. She seemed to have put all sentiment deliberately aside.

“Julian,” she said, “you have made a terrible mistake! You are taking just the one false step that would be absolutely irretrievable. You must come back to town at once!”

Her manner; her voice; some influence from the long past days when her word, for all her affectation of weak indulgence, had been his law; had arrested his attention almost without his own consent. He stood now looking at her; looking at her across such a gulf of ignorance, mistake, and wrong as had swallowed even that bitterness with which he had once regarded her, leaving him absolutely cold and dead to her.

“Town and I have parted company, mother!” he said. He spoke hoarsely, but the emotion in his tone was the reflex of that through which he had just passed in meeting Clemence; his manner was even callous.

“That would be true indeed,” was the quick answer, “if you had succeeded in leaving England! Not only town and you, but life and you—everything that makes life worth living—would have parted company! To go away now is to cut your own throat!”

Julian turned to Falconer.

“Haven’t you told them?” he said thickly. “Don’t they know that—that is done?”

Falconer drew a step nearer.

“Your mother knows——” he began; but Mrs. Romayne interposed, lifting her hand peremptorily without even glancing at him.

“I know everything,” she said. “I know that you are in hideous danger, and if you run away from it it is indeed all over with you. You must face it; you must defy it!”

As though in her last words she had touched and given form and life to the very core of the determination which had nerved her since she had first read Julian’s letter that morning, her voice rose as she spoke them into a ring of indomitable courage, vibrating with the very triumph of that defiance of which she spoke. Her slight, haggard physique seemed to expand, to gain in dignity and power; as the whole room seemed to fill with the magnetism of her intense resolution. There was an instant’s pause, and then an exclamation broke alike from Julian and from Falconer. Julian’s was almost derisive in its absolute repudiation of her words; Falconer’s was sternly incredulous. Clemence was standing a little apart. No sound came from her, but she lifted her face suddenly and turned it towards Mrs. Romayne. A vague horror and confusion had dawned in her eyes.

Before the annihilating words with which Falconer obviously intended to follow up his first ejaculation could be uttered, Mrs. Romayne was speaking again—in a rapid, businesslike tone now, but always with that ring of triumph behind it.

“You must come back with me to-night and take up your position as if nothing could shake it. You must fight for your credit and your social status tooth and nail. When you have lost them you have lost everything! You have not lost them yet, and no risk is too great to run for their retention.”

“Not penal servitude?” asked Julian, with a ghastly smile.

“Not penal servitude, not hanging—if that were the risk,” returned his mother passionately. “What are you better off if you escape—disgraced, ostracised, ruined beyond all hope of reclamation—than you would be in a convict’s cell? What would you have to live for—to hope for? When you have lost your position with the world you have lost everything. What does it matter that you go down in one wave rather than another?” She paused a moment, battling with her fierce horror and repulsion. Then she went on again in another tone, eager and decided. “But the risk is not so frightful after all,” she said. “Show it a bold front and we shall triumph over it! Now, listen to me, Julian. This other man—this man Ramsay—was the actual forger?”

She paused for an answer, and apparently the insistence of her tone forced one from Julian in spite of himself.

“As far as the actual commission of the forgery goes—yes,” he said sullenly. “But——”

“Then what is there to prove—to prove, mind—that you were a party to it?”

Julian glanced round at Clemence as if involuntarily. Then he looked recklessly back at his mother and laughed harshly.

“The facts——” he began.

His mother caught up the words.

“The facts? Yes!” she said. “But if the facts are denied? Can they be proved? If you face this meeting and say that you yourself have been deceived? Even if it should come to a prosecution there are always loopholes! With good counsel and facing it out ourselves unflinchingly, you would come through untouched! It is the only chance, Julian, and we must dare it.”