“I—I can’t!” he gasped. “I can’t touch her! It’s—it’s a watch and my cigar case——”
Faradeane bent down and reverently took the things from the dead woman’s pocket, and dropped them at Bradstone’s feet.
“Go, quick!” he said.
Bradstone snatched at the things, and turned; then he stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“What—what are you going to do?” he asked, hoarsely. “I—I haven’t thanked you; but by Heaven——”
“What I am going to do rests with me,” came the stern response. “Let it be what it may, it is not for your sake, but for her sake!”
He raised his hand again, and Bartley Bradstone, with one last parting glance at the woman he had murdered, staggered from the glade.
Faradeane leaned against a tree, and hid his face in his hands, and thought. And, incredible as it may seem, it was not of the woman who had ruined his life, and who now lay dead at his feet, not of the awful peril in which he had placed himself in shielding the murderer, not of Bartley Bradstone; it was upon Olivia his mind was fixed.
Surely never was a woman placed in a more awful, a more heartrending position. The wife of a scoundrel who had stained his hands with blood upon her wedding day!
“Oh, my darling, my darling!” broke from his lips in a despairing moan. Then he let his hands fall and looked up at the bright sky which shone through the thick branches of the trees. “Something I can save you from, something of the shame, the misery; but yet how little, how little! Oh, my darling! my poor, poor darling!” and in his burning eyes the hot tears gathered—tears wrung from his heart by the thought of the anguish which awaited her. “Yes, something I can save you and I will! I can save you from him even now! Thank God, thank God it is not too late!”