"The man was a criminal and he was a fugitive from justice. Conscience—my conscience—insisted that it was my plain duty to raise the hue and cry. For a long time I couldn't do it; and then——"
He waited until the silence had grown unbearable before he prompted her. "And then?"
"And then chance threw us together. A new world was opened to me in those few moments. I had thought that there could be no possible question between simple right and wrong, but almost in his first word the man convinced me that, whatever I might think or the world might say, his conscience had fully and freely acquitted him. And he proved it; proved it so that I can never doubt it as long as I live. He made me do what my conscience had been telling me I ought to do—just as your Fleming makes Fidelia do."
"You denounced him?" he said, and he strove desperately to make the saying completely colorless.
"Yes."
"And he was taken?"
"He was; but he made his escape again, almost at once. He is still a free man."
Instantly the primitive instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of the hunted fugitive, sprang alert in the listener.
"How can you be sure of that?" he asked, and in his own ears his voice sounded like the clang of an alarm bell.
Again a silence fell, surcharged, this one, with all the old frightful possibilities. Once more the loathsome fever quickened the pulses of the man at bay, and the curious needle-like prickling of the skin came to signal the return of the homicidal fear-frenzy. The reaction to the normal racked him like the passing of a mortal sickness when his accusing angel said in her most matter-of-fact tone: