“Yes, and also to tell you that I hope to meet and kiss the lady a great many more times.”
“Never, at least, in this world again,” grimly broke in the other, lashed to madness by the insolent smile of his antagonist, and stepping back a pace, he levelled the revolver full at the stranger’s face.
As the other saw the gleam of the barrel he shouted “Stay!” and threw back his head, but the action was too late, the bullet struck him in the temple, and he fell to the ground, his face bathed in blood.
For a moment the other stood motionless with the smoking weapon in his hand. Then he stooped and looked in the face of the dead man.
All the amazing fury had died out of his heart; he looked towards the home where his wife was awaiting him, and he murmured, “God forgive you, Alice, you have made me a murderer.” Then there came to him, as to all similarly circumstanced, the brute instinct of self-preservation. “No one saw me arrive,” he muttered to himself, “no one will suspect me; still, I would like her to know that I had found out her crime and punished it.”
As he said this, a strange, ghastly smile, weird in the extreme, crept over his face, and he laid on the dead man’s breast gently—not in tribute to the man, but in reverence of death—the wedding-ring which he had bought that day to replace the missing one.
“She will understand by this just how it happened,” he murmured, as he turned to go.
Once he looked back and saw the dark form lying on the lonely road, and, so strange a composite is humanity, he felt a thrill of revengeful joy, to think how refined a method of punishment he had discovered for his wife.
Poor, short-sighted, misguided man; how little he dreamt of the widespread harm which that small, innocent-looking gold hoop was destined to work.