“Hugh will be down directly,” Helen told Latham as she came in, a moment after Mrs. Hilary had gone.

“Good. I will take him away in my car, and find some place where he can stay safely until we can get at the truth of this.”

“Ah, that is good of you,” Helen thanked him.

“Remember,” Latham reminded her gravely, “sooner or later Hugh must give himself up.”

“He knows that,” Helen said bravely.

“I drive my own car now,” the doctor said briskly, “so we can start at once. Be sure he’s ready.”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Then I’ll get the car and bring it round,” he said over his shoulder as he went.

She scarcely heard his last words, or realized that he had gone. She stood very still, one hand on the table—one on her breast. There was something trance-like in the tense, slender figure. Her wide eyes glazed. Her breath came in slow, heavy beats. Presently she gave a great sigh, lifted her hand from her breast to her head, then moved slowly towards the bookcase, her hand stretched out in front of her now, as if leading and pointing. She moved mechanically, as sleep walkers move, and almost as if impelled from behind. Her face was still and mask-like.

She had almost reached the bookshelves, almost touched with her outheld hand “David Copperfield,” when Stephen came into the room. Instantly something odd and uncanny in her manner arrested him. For one moment he stood riveted, spell-bound, then he shook off furiously the influence that held him, and exclaimed abruptly, peremptorily, “Helen! Helen!”

His voice broke the spell, and she turned to him blankly, like one who had but just awakened from heavy sleep. A moment she gazed at him unseeingly; then she moaned and tottered. She would have fallen, but Stephen caught her and held her. The spell, the faintness, whatever it was, passed or changed, and she moved slowly from his hold, greatly excited, but conscious, and more nearly normal; the rapt look on her face still, but penetrated more and more by her own personality, awake and normally sentient.

All at once she realized. In one flash of time, one great beat of emotion, she saw.

“Stephen!” she panted.

“What is it?” Pryde said, guiding her to a chair, and urging her into it gently.

“Stephen,” she repeated, both palms pressed on her forehead. “Oh!”

“What is the matter?” he asked hoarsely, dazed and perturbed.

“Just now—when you spoke”; her voice gathered tone as she continued, grew bell-clear, ringing, flute-fine, “the message was coming—it almost got through, it almost got through! Something was telling me what to do to save Hugh.”

Her eyes glowed like deep blue lamps, around her face a veil of transparent lambent whiteness clung, and transfigured it. The girl was in ecstasy.

Stephen Pryde was terribly shaken. He looked at Helen in fear and amazement. Then, unable to refrain, though he tried his strongest, he looked over his shoulder uneasily. When he could speak his voice was harsh and unnatural.

“Impossible,” he said roughly; “impossible.”

“No, no,” the girl whispered exultantly, clearly. “I know—I can’t tell you anything, but that I know, I know, I know.”

There was a power in the girl-voice that reached and subdued Stephen. He was impressed, almost convinced.

“You know,” he said slowly, wonderingly. “Did this message—did it indicate some paper—tell you where to look for it?” For his soul, for his life, for his whole future at stake, he could not keep the words back. They were forced from him, as the hand of the player plucks the melody from a harp—the melody, or the discord. Something stronger than he ever had been, or ever could be, commanded and he obeyed, bowed to the infinite; his own conscience turned traitor and linked against him, linked with some nameless mightiness he had scoffed at and denied and defied.

“Paper?” Helen said. “What paper do you mean?”

He rushed on, goaded and driven. “I don’t know—only if there were some evidence here that would clear Hugh, it would be in the shape of a paper that—that——” His tongue clove thick in his mouth, clotted and mumbled with nervousness. He could scarcely enunciate; he could not enunciate clearly—“that seems reasonable, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, of course,” Helen agreed. “No—nothing of that sort came to me—the whole thing was so vague—so indistinct. But I am sure now; it will come back to me—and help me—I am sure it will.” The glow on her face, the great light in her eyes, grew brighter and brighter.

Stephen Pryde was almost in the state he had been in when he had dropped his glass on the fender and cried, “Who’s there? Uncle Dick!” While Helen spoke he kept looking over his shoulder. He was tremblingly conscious of a something in the room, a something that he felt was a some one—a presence. It almost overpowered him, the conviction, the chill, and the unprecedented sensation, but, summoning his iron will, he resolved to fight on; and with a flash of chicanery that was nothing short of genius, and nothing less than satanic, he determined even to take advantage of the dead man’s message. For it had come to that with him now. That Richard Bransby was in the room, and trying “to communicate,” he now no more doubted than Helen herself did. Well! let it be so. Let the dead man get the message through, if he could! He—he, Stephen—would take it, twist it, turn it, use it, seize it—destroy it, if need were. He had defied God and His angels, his own conscience, fate, the law of the land, and now he defied the soul and the consciousness and all the craft of one old man dead—dead and returned.

He turned to Helen impressively. “If—if it would only come to you now.”

“What?” the girl said uncomprehendingly.

“If I could find whatever it is—if you would help me to find it,” he insinuated earnestly.

“How can I?” she faltered.

“Try,” he urged masterfully—“try and get that message again.” His hands were so cold they ached. Sweat ran on his brow. But his voice was firm, his eyes imperative, compelling.

“I can’t,” Helen said piteously.

“You must, I tell you, you must.” He stamped his foot in his insistence.

“Stephen, you frighten me,” she said, shrinking.

“Try, Helen, try.” He whispered it gently, soothingly.

Like some beautiful, breathing marionette, she rose slowly, very slowly, pressed one hand over her eyes—stood rigid, but swaying, poised for motion, tuned for revelation—for receiving and transmitting a message.

Stephen Pryde watched her with straining eyes. His gasping breath froze on his stiffening lips. He put out one daring hand, and just touched her sleeve. At that touch some negative current seemed to sweep and surge through her. She recoiled, she shuddered, and then she relaxed from all her intensity, and sank wearily down into the nearest chair, saying dully—

“I can’t Stephen, I can’t!”

The banished blood leapt back to his face, and laughed in his heart, danced through his veins. His whole attitude was changed in one flash of time; the attitude of his flesh, the attitude of his mind. Helen had failed. The thing she had hoped, he had feared and defied, could not be done. It was farce. It was fraud—fraud worked on them by their caitiff nerves, as “fortunes” forsooth were told for a “bob” by old crones, from tea leaves—on the Brixton Road. And almost he had been persuaded, he, Stephen Pryde! Pshaw! Well, his fears were done for and past now once for all. The dead man could not reach her! The dead man; a handful of dust or of rot in a grave!

He turned to Helen in cold triumph. “I knew it—I knew it,” he exulted. “Don’t you see now, Helen, how you are deceiving yourself? If there was a message for you, why shouldn’t it come? I tried to help you—to put myself in sympathy—you saw how useless it was.”

But Helen had been too near the unseen, too far across the dread borderland. Doubt could not touch her again. She had stood in the edge of the light. She had felt. Almost she had heard and had seen. She knew. She shook her head, without troubling to answer him or look toward him. She shook her head and she smiled.

“Where’s Latham?” Pryde said in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone.

She answered him as crisply, and as commonplace in manner and word.

“He is going to take poor Hugh away in his car; he has gone to get it ready.”

“Oh!”

“He is going to take him to some place where he will be safe until we can find the evidence that will clear him.”

“But there isn’t any,” Pryde said with truculent brutality; and his eyes measured yet again, gloatingly, the distance and the angle from the writing-table to the fireplace.

“I know there is,” Helen said quietly.

“There can’t be,” Stephen stormed, almost losing grip of himself—very nearly had he reached his breaking-point. “I tell you, there can’t be.”

Helen sat and studied her cousin curiously. She was not a thoughtful girl, and the abnormal strains through which she had been passing for some time now had conspired to make thought peculiarly difficult; but there was much in Stephen’s manner, in what he said and in how he said it, in his face, his eyes, his gestures, his inconsistencies, to compel thought and arouse suspicion, even in a mind as tired and as little given to analysis as hers was.

She was on his track now, not in the least knowing or surmising what was hidden in his soul, but sensing that there was something, something that it behooved her, for Hugh’s sake, to fathom. Whether she might have fathomed it, as she sat watching him with troubled, doubting eyes, would be difficult to guess. And in a few moments her detective train of thought was broken by Hugh’s voice. He came in gravely but cheerfully, and said, as he stood smiling down on her tenderly—

“Here I am, Helen.”

She smiled back at him, little minded to show less courage than her man did in this climax moment of their ordeal.

“Doctor Latham will be here in a minute; he’s going to take you away in his car,” she said as cheerfully as Hugh himself had spoken, and rising and linking her arm in his.

“But I can’t go, Helen,” Hugh told her,—“not yet—it wouldn’t be right for me to go until I have searched this room—I—why, if I turn towards the door even, something pushes me back. I mustn’t go, dear; I must search first. It won’t take long—I can do it before they get here.”

Stephen came to his brother, and laid his hands on Hugh’s shoulders. As Stephen came towards them, Helen drew a little away.

“No,” Stephen said earnestly, “no; why not go with Latham now, and then, come back—when it is safe?”

Hugh wavered. This elder brother had always influenced him much. They had been orphans together, and in their early orphaned days, the elder had been something of father and mother too to Hugh Pryde. Stephen’s earliest recollection was of their mother; Hugh’s earliest was of Stephen, mending a broken toy for him, and comforting him with a silver threepence. A thousand times Stephen had befriended him. Stephen was proved wise, again and again, and kind and disinterested.

“That would give me more time,” the boy said, looking gratefully into the affectionate, brotherly eyes that were bent steadily on his—“that’s not a bad idea. If Latham took me as far as the Heath they’d never find me there—never—then late to-night I could come back.”

“No,” Stephen interrupted, “not the Heath—it must be some place where I can get to you; it may not be safe to come back to-night—they may leave some one here to watch.”

“Yes,” Hugh agreed, “they’re almost sure to do that. Where shall I wait, Stevie?”

Stephen Pryde winced at the old name of their playfellow days—Hugh had not used it for years. But he had put his foot upon the fratricidal plowshare of deceit and treachery, and it was beyond him to withdraw it now. At that bitter moment he would have spared his brother if he could—but it was too late. Suffering acutely (probably Cain suffered so once), he said emphatically, “Oakhill! The wood on the other side.”

“But if they find me there,” Hugh objected, “I wouldn’t have a chance to get away.”

Stephen’s hands were still on his brother’s shoulders and he leaned his weight upon them.

“They won’t find you, my boy, trust me.”

It was enough, and Hugh’s answer came instant and content.

“All right, Stephen!”

“Good-by,” the elder said hastily. “I’ll go hurry up Latham; the sooner you are away from here now the better.” He released Hugh, and turned to go. But Hugh held out both his hands, and for a long moment the brothers stood looking earnestly into each other’s eyes, hands gripped—Helen, apart, watching them, dissatisfied. Then Stephen turned on his heel and walked resolutely away, out of the room.