"Then who was it?"
"Don't ask me that. I cannot answer you."
"Who was it? Tell me, tell me."
"I can't! I can't!"
"Was it in Ramsey—his chambers?"
"Yes."
"Is he? .... is he anything to me?"
Bessie dropped her head still deeper into Fenella's lap and made no answer.
"Is he?" said Fenella, and in her gathering terror, getting no reply, she lifted Bessie's head and looked searchingly into her face, as if to probe her soul.
At the next moment the dreadful truth had fallen on her. The girl's fellow-sinner, the man she had been hunting down to punish him, to shame him, to expose him to public obloquy, was Victor Stowell himself!