"The woman was sinking rapidly and I begged her to tell me her name.
"'I have come into your life unknown and in a cruel, base fashion; let me go out of it a stranger. A stranger, that is it! Once I was called Lucille and that will do for the end; Lucille L'Etrangere! Only, if you have still more compassion left for me in your warm, young heart, save me from burial at their hands! Put me away quietly somewhere, I beg of you, in an unmarked grave!'
"She died at dawn and then I went down and had it out with father. I hope never to live through another such hour! His grief and shame were pitiful, but he seemed relieved, too, that I knew the truth at last. He had been driven to the wall, and was almost mad.
"He arranged for the woman's burial in a little forgotten graveyard nearby. The coroner was an old friend and everything was managed very quietly and without question.
"When it was over I told father that I would be able to save him from further persecution if he would consent to go to a sanitarium and spread the rumor that his mind was permanently wrecked so that the gang would cease their activities in his direction until my purpose was accomplished. I withheld the details of my plan, for he would never have consented to my facing the danger, but his tortured mind was on the verge of giving way and he agreed helplessly to my proposal.
"In the meantime I had received a letter from an old school friend, Betty Shaw, who is like me in type and coloring, but has a huge birthmark like a clutching hand upon her cheek. She had moved West ages ago, but when her mother died she went to Chicago to earn her living, and there received a proposal from an old sweetheart who is now in British Columbia. Her letter was to tell me that she had gone out there to marry him, and I resolved to take her name and imitate her appearance, so that if I succeeded in gaining a position with Mrs. Atterbury and she wrote for reference out to the Western town where Betty had lived, my supposed identity could be established beyond question.
"I closed our house, leaving no address, painted the scar on my face and, as Betty Shaw, went to a cheap boarding house in the city. From there I inserted an advertisement in the papers, asking for a position as secretary and emphasizing my friendlessness as much as I dared.
"It succeeded, for Mrs. Atterbury herself was one of the applicants for my services. I cannot describe my sensations when I saw the very car in which I had made that memorable trip draw up before the door! I went back with her to the house I had visited that night, but the man servant I had interviewed was gone and I have never encountered him since.
"Much of the rest of my story must have been told to you by Herbert; how I searched every night that I dared for the check and letter, and how I found the murdered man on the floor of the dining-room.
"There was a little dressmaker whom Mrs. Atterbury hired during the first days of my stay to make some things for me, and she tried to warn me that I was in danger of being led into a trap, and begged me to go. She was afraid to explain, however, and her visits soon ceased. No one else tried to help me but her.