interest; and surely you cannot be indifferent to the grave charge that is hanging over you."
"I am not indifferent," she murmured, with a deep sigh.
"Then let me urge you to confide in your solicitors," I said, "and withhold nothing from them that may enable them to prepare your defence."
"I shall confide in no one," she replied in the same indifferent, same sweetly pathetic tone.
"But think of the consequences," I urged.
"I have thought of everything."
"Remember also, Miss Artois, your silence and refusal to give information will be tantamount to a tacit confession of guilt."
For a moment her dreamy eyes seemed to lose their dreaminess and to be expressive of an infinite pain, as she answered with quite a fiery energy—
"I am not guilty!" She laid peculiar emphasis on the word "not."
"Then," said I, quickly, "do all you possibly can to prove your guiltlessness"—and in order that there should be no ambiguity in my meaning, I added "if you are the victim of anyone, for Heaven's sake let it be known. For the sake of your lover conceal not the truth."
"For the sake of my lover and the love I bear him I will die," she murmured, with the dreaminess which seemed peculiar to her.
"Then withhold nothing from your solicitors," I repeated.
"Go!" she said, peremptorily, as she sank into her seat again, and resumed her reading.
"Have you no message to send to Mr. Kingsley?" I asked.
"Go!" she repeated, without looking at me.
"Let me take some comforting word from you to Mr. Kingsley," I entreated.
She made no reply, but apparently was deeply absorbed in the book. Feeling that it would be useless to remain any longer, I withdrew, and as I did so she did not even look up from the book, nor did she make any response when I bade her adieu.
I had promised to call upon Mr. Kingsley and acquaint him with the result of my interview with Miss Artois; and I carried out this promise with a sense of distress that I could hardly describe, because I was quite unable to give him the assurance he so much wanted that his fiancée was guiltless. Guiltless she was, in one sense, I was sure; but I was conscious of the fact that I was confronted with as complicated a human problem as I had ever been called upon to find a solution of.
I put the best face I could on matters while talking to young Kingsley; and on leaving him I felt convinced that my first surmise with reference to the coachman being a party to the robbery was a correct one. I had not been slow to determine that Miss Artois' temperament was one of those deeply sympathetic and poetic ones which are peculiarly subject to the influence of stronger wills.
In short, I came to the conclusion that the coachman was the really guilty person, and Miss Artois was his victim. He—in my opinion—had exercised some strange mesmeric influence over her, and she had been entirely under his sway. I was confirmed in this view when I learnt that the great Spieglemann had gathered up a mass of circumstantial evidence which tended to prove that Miss Artois had been in the habit for a long time of visiting some of the leading tradesmen in all quarters of London, and that these tradesmen had been robbed of property which in the aggregate represented many thousands of pounds.
It was altogether a peculiar case, as it presented two startling phases of human nature; and if Miss Artois had sinned, she had sinned not because her inclinations tended that way, but because her non-resisting, sympathetic nature had been made an instrument for the profit and gain of a debased and wicked man who did not scruple to use this beautiful girl as a means to an end.
My next step was to hurry off to the Lindens at Thames Ditton, in order that I might get full particulars from Mr. Tamworth of his coachman, before having the man arrested. The Lindens was a large house, standing in its own grounds, and everything about the place was suggestive of wealth and comfort. I was ushered into an elegantly furnished drawing-room, and a few minutes later the door opened, and a little, podgy, bald-headed man, wearing gold eye-glasses, and dressed in a large patterned dressing gown and Turkish slippers, entered, and eyed me with a pair of strangely keen and hawk-like eyes. It was Mr. Tamworth, and in many respects he was a striking and remarkable man, for his face was strongly marked, his eyes of unusual, almost unnatural brilliancy, the mouth firm, the square jaw indicative of an iron will. He was perfectly clean shaved, so that every feature, every line and angle were thrown into stronger prominence.
