"How long have you been here?"
"Twenty-four hours."
"You are lucky to have remained undetected so long. Now I hope you'll stay in your room till night and then get away as quickly and quietly as possible."
"There's nothing else to do," he said heavily. "I have been to Lester. The places are all changed and the people are new. Everything has passed away--except the official record of the trial and the sentence."
"Of course it would all be changed," I said, as lightly as possible. "But I am going to examine the account of the trial and see if there was anything in the procedure which will give us a loophole. But you mustn't stay here to complicate matters. You must get away,--as I have told you before."
He did not answer for a moment, but sat with bent head. Then he spoke slowly.
"I wonder if life would be worth having on the terms you suggest. Expatriation, separation from everything that you care for, everyone who makes your public, from all your associations and ambitions,--"
"You could establish new associations. You would see life from a different angle, and that is no small advantage. And--pardon me--you would not need to go alone."
He looked up swiftly at that. "Never! Do you think that I would let--anyone make so mad a choice?--dower her with such a life as I must live henceforward, dodging in the shadows, afraid of hearing my own name, an outlaw and a skulker? If I regard life for myself as of dubious value under such conditions, do you think I am so hopelessly mean as to ask anyone to share it with me?"
Of course I could understand his point of view, though he looked so handsome as he repudiated the idea that I guessed Miss Thurston would not have regarded the lot as wholly forlorn.