come of it?"

"Repentance, I should say. But how is it that Mrs. Schomberg has been
selected for a confidante?"

For indeed a waxwork figure would have seemed more useful than that
woman whom we all were accustomed to see sitting elevated above the two
billiard-tables--without expression, without movement, without voice,
without sight.

"Why, she helped the girl to bolt," said Davidson turning at me his
innocent eyes, rounded by the state of constant amazement in which
this affair had left him, like those shocks of terror or sorrow which
sometimes leave their victim afflicted by nervous trembling. It looked
as though he would never get over it.

"Mrs. Schomberg jerked Heyst's note, twisted like a pipe-light, into my
lap while I sat there unsuspecting," Davidson went on. "Directly I had
recovered my senses, I asked her what on earth she had to do with it
that Heyst should leave it with her. And then, behaving like a painted
image rather than a live woman, she whispered, just loud enough for me
to hear:

"I helped them. I got her things together, tied them up in my own shawl,
and threw them into the compound out of a back window. I did it."

"That woman that you would say hadn't the pluck to lift her little
finger!" marvelled Davidson in his quiet, slightly panting voice. "What
do you think of that?"