She was so intensely ready, so magnificently prepared for the stake, if
that should be her sentence, that Hewson could not help laughing. "Why
there isn't any punishment severe enough for a crime like that," he
began, but she would not allow him to trifle with the matter.

"Oh, I didn't think you would be so uncandid! The instant I read that
interview I made Mrs. Rock get ready to come. And we started the first
steamer. It seemed to me that I could not eat or sleep, till I had seen
you and told you what I had done and taken the consequences. And now do
you think it right to turn it off as a joke?"

"I don't wish to make a joke of it," said Hewson, gravely, in compliance
with her mood. "But I don't understand, quite, how you could have got the
story over there in time for you--"

"It was cabled to their London edition--that's what it said in the paper;
and by this time they must have it in Australia," said Miss Hernshaw,
with unrelieved severity.

"Oh!" said Hewson, giving himself time to realize that he was the
psychical hero of two hemispheres. "Well," he resumed "what do you expect
me to say?"

"I don't know what I expect. I expected you to say something without my
prompting you. You know that it was outrageous for me to talk about your
apparition without your leave, and to be the means of its getting into
the newspapers."

"I'm not sure you were the means. I have told the story a hundred