"If you do, I'll know it, and I'll kill you!" said the man at the door.
He was about to walk out when the other arose bewilderedly.
"Wait," he said, and his livid face was convulsed pitifully. He was so little more than a boy. "This that you have told me has muddled my head. I can't think. I know the promises, and I'll keep them. If shooting myself would help her, I'd do that; but you say you are leaving the country, and Annie is to live on at the old place, and—and yet be respected? I can't understand how, with—under the—the circumstances. I—"
"No, I don't reckon you can," scowled the other, altogether unmoved by the despairing eyes and broken, remorseful words. "It isn't natural that you should understand a man, or how a man feels; but Annie's name shall be one you had a right to give her four months ago—"
"What are you saying?" broke in the other with feverish intensity; "tell me! tell me what it is you mean!"
"I mean that she shan't be cheated out of a name for herself and child by your damned rascality! Her name for the rest of her life will be the same as yours—just remember that when you forward that transfer. She is my wife. We were married an hour before I started."
Then the door closed, and the dark, malignant looking fellow stalked out into the morning sunlight, and through the scented walk where late lillies nodded as he passed. He seemed little in keeping with their fragrant whiteness, for he looked not a whit less scowlingly wicked than on his entrance; and of some men working on the lawn, one said to another:
"Looks like he got de berry debbel in dem snappin' eyes—see how dey shine. Mighty rakish young genelman to walk out o' dat doah—look like he been on a big spree."
And when the bride and her friend came chattering in, with their hands full of roses, they found a strange, unheard-of thing had happened. The tall young husband, so strong, so long acclimated, had succumbed to the heat of the morning, or the fragrance of the tuberose beside him, and had fallen in a fainting fit by the door.