Theydon was genuinely sorry for this gray-haired woman's plight, and she evidently regarded him as a kind-hearted and eminently trustworthy young man.

He stood and watched the cab as it bore her off swiftly into the maelstrom of London.

He could not help thinking that seldom had he met one less fitted for the notoriety thrust upon all connected with a much-talked-of crime.
When the press interviewers, the photographers, the hundred and one officials with whom she must be brought in contact, were done with her, poor Miss Beale would retire to her Oxfordshire nook in a state of mental bewilderment that would baffle description.

In one of his books Theydon had endeavored to depict just such a middle-aged spinster confronted with a situation not wholly unlike that which now faced Miss Beale.
He smiled grimly when he realized how far fiction had wandered from fact.

The woman of his imagination had acted with a strength of character, a decisiveness, that outwitted and confounded certain scheming personages in the story.