'Then I'm safe,' she said, 'for he will never betray me; to kiss and tell is not his nature. He is all the noblest generosity! Don't think my love is dead, Ally,' she added in something of her old tones. 'It lives, and it will live, purified. I'll tear the earthly part of it from my heart, and live in hopes that we may meet in heaven!' Soothed by this interesting and sanguine reflection, Nancy grew calmer. She took a little of her sleeping medicine, and Alison was just beginning to look forward to an hour of peace, when she awoke with a scream. 'Oh, God!' she cried aloud, 'my key!'
'Hush, Nancy; Jean will hear you,' said Alison, patiently. 'What key?'
'My key,' reiterated Nancy, working herself up into a passion of terror; 'my house key. Oh! fool that I was! I gave it to him in all innocence: it was before your own eyes, Alison, and only to save Jean when she was throng. It has an ivory label to it, with my name and the street's name, and if it is found with him I am undone—undone!' She twined her fingers in her hair and would have torn it but that Alison held her hands. Alison herself looked blank enough; the matter of the key struck her as a bad business, incriminating evidence enough in the hands of such a man as Burns—careless, if he was not malicious, and, like all men, leaving things about. 'Ally, as you love me, you must go and get it from him!' said Nancy; 'I'll not trust the matter upon paper. I must have a messenger, and that messenger must be you.'
'Nay, but that's too much!' cried Alison, turning white.
'Too much?' said Nancy, piteously. 'Too much to save your friend whom you have promised to save? Oh, Ally, pity me—pity me—and go!' She put up her trembling arms and caught Alison about the neck, clinging to her.
'If I go,' said poor Alison, desperately, 'will you promise me one thing, Nancy—never, never to send me on another message to this man?'
'Never! I swear!' cried Nancy. 'Oh, Ally, I've been wrong to do it so often, most hideously selfish and wrong so to have used your good-nature. But you'll forgive me, for I knew not what I did!'
Alison met the inevitable with a kind of cold, white calm. Her very flesh shrank from the thought of meeting Burns, of being near him and breathing the same air. Now she must not only go to his house, but in all probability enter it, doing that which, to anyone not acquainted with the intricacies of the affair and her own obscure part in it, was, on the face of it, open to the gravest misconstruction. Should Herries know of it—what then? But a kind of despair had come to Alison on this point. She must do what she had to do; it was all a ghastly mistake, a growing and intolerable injustice, but she must blunder on with it now. She was the same Alison, and in the same mood, who had desperately promised in Jacky's twilight nursery, weeks ago, to marry Mr. Cheape because duty drove her to it, and she saw no other way.
It was agreed that she should wait till nearly dusk before setting out, and it was, perhaps, five or six o'clock before she left the house. She hurried through the familiar streets, choosing the obscurer ones, and keeping in the shadow—haunted by a sense of the guilt which was not hers. She stood at last before the odiously familiar door in St. James's Square, and knocked. It was opened to her by Nicol, and Alison's flesh crept, for she loathed the man, and feared him now—she knew not why.
'Is Mr. Burns within?' she asked in a low voice. Nicol looked her up and down with an indescribable insolence.