"What is the state of things, really, do you suppose?" said Llwellyn.
"Imminent with doom for us!" Schuabe answered in a deep and melancholy voice. "It is all clear to me now. Your woman was set on to you by these men from the first. They are clever men. Michael Manichoe is behind them all. She got the story. Spence has been sent to verify it. He has got everything from Ionides. The Government has been told. These things have been going on during the last few hours. Spence has cabled something of his news, perhaps not all. He will be back to-day, this afternoon. He will have left Paris by now, and almost be nearing Amiens. In that train, Llwellyn, lies our death-warrant. Nothing can stop it. They will send the news all over the world to-night. It will be announced in London by dinner-time, probably."
Llwellyn groaned again. In this supreme hour of torture the sensualist was nearer collapse than the ascetic. His life told heavily. He looked up. His face was green-grey save where, here and there, his fingers had pressed into, and left red marks upon, the cheeks, which had lost their firmness and begun to be pendulous and flabby.
"What do you think must be the end?" he said.
"The end is here," said Schuabe. "What matters the form or manner of it? They may bring in a bill and hang us, they will certainly give us penal servitude for life, but probably we shall be torn in pieces by the mob. There is only one thing left."
He made an expressive gesture. Llwellyn shuddered.
"All is not necessarily at an end," he said. "I shall make a last effort to get away. I have still got the clergyman's clothes I wore when I went to Jerusalem. There will be time to get out of London before this evening."
"All over the continent and America you would be known. There is no getting away nowadays. As for me, I shall go down to my place in Manchester by the mid-day train. There is just time to catch it. And there I shall die before they can come to me."
He got up and strode away out of the flat with a set, stern face. Never a passing look did he give to the man he had enriched and damned for ever. Never a gesture of farewell.
Already he was as one in the grave. Llwellyn, left to himself in the silent, richly furnished flat, fell into hysterical sobbing.