Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear undertone,
audible only to him, which faltered the merest trifle ([Page 316].)

THE LONG LANE'S TURNING

BY

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

(Mrs. Post Wheeler)

Author of "Satan Sanderson" "Hearts Courageous,"
"The Valiants of Virginia," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FRANCES ROGERS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917

Copyright, 1916, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
as "The Heart of a Man"

Copyright, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[ Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear
undertone, audible only to him, which faltered
the merest trifle. (Page 316) . . . Frontispiece ]

[ "I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.
You will please consider it final" ]

[ He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet ]

[ All at once the hound flung up his great head with a
low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless
hand that hung down ]

THE LONG LANE'S TURNING

CHAPTER I

THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE

The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in their wall-brackets. Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now considering their verdict in an upper room—to return again and again to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day.

He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp-light the hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.

To a stranger there would have seemed little in the circumstances to inspire the popular interest the full room betokened. The accused was a rough sawyer, known to his fellows of the logging camp as "Paddy the Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him. The crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings, the story merely one of those sordid dramas of menial life which were so familiar. The evidence, though purely circumstantial, was, to a casual eye, sufficiently conclusive.

Yet in the minds of most of those who had filled the dingy court room during the two days just passed, there had been until the last hour a general expectation that the man would be cleared. This had been based upon nothing save the common knowledge that his counsel was Harry Sevier.

The latter had never failed to justify the expectations that had habitually heralded his doings. Young, likable, perfectly equipped and knowing his southern world, he had returned, after a half dozen years of foreign schooling, to step into a social niche readily accorded him by those who had seen little of him since boyhood. His grey eyes and crisp, dark beard, had been distinguishing marks of forebears whose lives had been lived in that neighbourhood and who had left their vivid impress upon the institutions of their time; statesmen, diplomats and soldiers had been of that line, and he himself, with his characteristic mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his type. Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money judiciously, if lavishly. His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in appointment. He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be dominated "pink teas" by the envious unbidden, were affairs to which an entrée was a hallmark. He maintained also a shooting-box on an upper slope of the Blue Ridge—a comfortable bungalow set in a hundred acres of wilderness—whither of autumns he and a dozen other choice spirits were wont to fare for a fortnight's tramping and fishing, sleeping on pungent hemlock boughs and eating homely food cooked by the single negro servant who lived there as caretaker. He had a gift for private theatricals—he was in constant demand of the Amateur Dramatic Club—and had more than a dilettante appreciation of music and art.

As regards his profession, he had injected into the somewhat cut-and-dried legal life of the old Capital an unusual and winning element of personality and a method at variance with established usage. His very eccentricities had set him apart from the mass, who were so glamoured with the sordid things of life; and the apparent contempt for material reward with which he defended poor and unknown clients as readily as rich and influential ones had its appeal to a class which possessed imagination and ideals. There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. In the four years in which he had stamped his individuality upon the town, not only had he never lost a criminal case, but he had created a certain conviction that a trial in which he figured would offer unmistakable elements of surprise and entertainment. So that the Criminal Court had come, in a way, to be the fashion, and the sombre chambers of justice saw many an assemblage that would have graced another sort of gathering.

Seldom, however, on this day had Harry's glance through his gold-rimmed eye-glasses wandered to the benches. With many there he had danced and golfed and bridged a hundred times. That, however, had been play; this, which had come to furnish another and quite as fascinating a sort of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more serious business—in so far as anything had been serious to him—of his life. So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his personality for the sober business in hand, set over against the palpable frivolity of purpose that actuated the moiety of his audience, was, after all, only another indication to them of that fine sense of the fitting for which his world admired him.

Through the long morning the evidence had accumulated. One by one the merciless rivets had been driven home by the prosecuting attorney. The chain of evidence seemed flawless. And Harry Sevier's cross-examination had seemed scarcely more than perfunctory—had appeared somehow to miss that subtle and pregnant suggestion, that longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but baffling doubt. Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the nicely calculated spoke in the wheel that, under the manipulation of the state's attorney, was rolling so swiftly in its ominous course; and on the back-benches, where sat a group of members of the Country Club, a whispered bet that the accused this time would not get off, found as usual no taker.

Evidence finished, the Court rose for a recess and Harry vanished through a side-door. Ten minutes later he was in his office. He vouchsafed no word to the clerk who sat in the outer room, but passed quickly through to the inner sanctum and closed and locked the door. The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained. There were moist drops upon his forehead but his hands were arid and dry. He drew the blind to shut out the dull, grey, winter light and switched on the electric desk-lamp, and as he did so his eyes turned stealthily to the wall—to a locked cabinet whose key was in his pocket.

They turned again almost immediately to the baize-covered desk, where stood a plain, flat silver frame. It held a photograph of a portrait painted by Sargent which had been a salon favourite of a few years before. It was that of a young girl, seated and leaning intently forward from an arm chair. One hand was at her throat, the other dropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of life. The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the result of the selection and inbreeding of generations. He stood still a moment, looking fixedly at it, his tongue touching his lips, before he crossed the room and turned the picture face-down upon the desk. He almost ran to the cabinet, unlocked its mirrored door, and took from it a bottle and a glass. He poured out a full goblet of the gurgling liquid and drank it off. Then he drew a long breath.

"Yes," he said, "I'll lie to myself no more! I've got to have it or throw up the sponge. It was my own once, that wonderful gift—whatever it is. Once it was my own brain, unhelped, that sent the glow to my heart and the fire to my tongue—till words had glorious colours and pictures painted themselves out of nothing. Once it was my own mind that saw a problem as clear as crystal. But I wasn't content. I wanted the short cut, and this showed me the way. And now—now—I've dropped the reins. It's not Harry Sevier that wins cases—it's that bottle!"

He began to stride up and down the narrow room; deep lines had etched themselves in the mobile face. "There was the Davencourt Case," he said to himself. "Not a shred of decent evidence to go on, and the whole court packed with prejudice, and he was as guilty as the devil. Yet I won! That was only a year ago, but I couldn't do it now—without what is in that decanter! All day yesterday I was heavy, my mind was as blank as a glacier. In the cross-examination I couldn't see a foot before me. But for this half-hour it would go hard with my client at the finish. As it is I wouldn't want a better foil than old Maitland for the prosecution. How he has slaved over his witnesses! I might have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way. For this 'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness. Half the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee. But pshaw! what's the use? I can get him off without it. In the last analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them—feeling first, and then conscience. Every man of them must see himself, first shivering in the shoes of my thief, and then wearing the Judge's gown. When the psychological moment comes there is only to drive home the fallibility of circumstantial evidence and sear those twelve slow-going, matter-of-fact brains with a sense of the inherent perversity of appearances!" He smiled bitterly. "Especially," he added, "when there's whisky in the story. My client was drunk as a boiled owl when he was arrested—the stolen plunder might easily have been put on him, as he claims it was. The jury will understand that. There's probably not a man on it who doesn't get squiffy now and then."

He stopped in his walk and held up a hand against the light—it wavered ever so little. The draught had not yet brought its accustomed poise of nerve—its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence. With an impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet. "One used to do it," he said; "it will evidently take more to-day to restore our bold Turpin to his career on the highway!" He set the empty glass in its place with a short laugh.

"Curious," he said. "If he were innocent and drink had got him into this scrape, there would be a poetic justice in drink's getting him out!"

As he turned to lock the cabinet, the bell of his desk-telephone rang—three short, sharp rings. It was the clerk's warning that the court was about to reassemble. He drew a deep breath, and cast a quick glance at the little mirrored door. No tinge was rising in his colourless face, no warming tingle in his veins. His hands were uncertain and his fingers had an odd numbness. A keen, cold edge of anxiety touched him. Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change—the gradual glow creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his brain. The signal was too long in coming to-day—and he could not wait! His hand shook as it reached again to the little shelf. An instant he hesitated—for a breath, while the light twinkled from the deep-cut facets, he strove to remember whether he had drunk one glass or two. Then with a frown he poured the draught and drinking it off, locked the cabinet, and went hurriedly out.

When he entered the courtroom, the wide space had filled again and the State's Attorney had opened his address—a brief one, icily emotionless and rigidly exact—the very background upon which so often Harry Sevier's winged words had spelled victory for a cause prejudged as lost. And he was to reply—with the final speech for whose inspiration he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office. Paddy the Brick listened with the look of some trapped thing gazing at its captor, sometimes turning toward his counsel a furtive wavering glance that was blent equally of dread and dog-like appeal. These glances were unreturned. Harry Sevier sat motionless, his eyes straight before him.

But behind that mask Harry's thought was turning and turning upon itself. The sudden sharp edge of anxiety that had caught him in his office had grown to a thriving fear. His ally was failing him. The master, whose upper hand he had just acknowledged—whose aid had been so freely given him in really vital moments—was forsaking him at the turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery! He realised it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled with a dull anger at the littleness of the issue, and through the confused mist of his mind his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter—as though the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.

He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties, while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled reared and struggled vainly. Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie outside of himself—to associate itself strangely with the prisoner. But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn apart—the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother and of the despairing face of the man with the wiry sand-coloured hair who sat slouched in his chair beside him.

The roomful seemed very still. The Judge was looking at him fixedly, through bowed horn-glasses set far down on his nose. Harry was aware that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy relief struggled together. With desperate narrowness he watched the faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless and impassive. There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused further struggle. He knew that he had been betrayed. The door of human sympathy would not open—he had lost the magic key.

The reply of the State's Attorney was a mere résumé of the evidence. He had needed no more. The Judge's charge was brief. Then had come the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers—the shuffling of feet as the Judge retired and the jurors filed out—and at length the painful hiatus with the red sunlight and the pallid lamps.

This was broken presently by three measured raps on the door of the jury-room, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors. They were quickly polled and the verdict given—guilty. The sentence followed immediately.

With the fateful words Harry Sevier turned his eyes, almost as if suddenly awakening from sleep, upon the court-room, and met across the moving benches a woman's concentrated and wondering look. She was Echo Allen, the original of the portrait whose photograph lay face-down upon his office desk. The neutral-tinted presentment, however, had been far from realising the concrete flush of sensuous beauty of its living original, with her straight lithe frame, her hair all a wash of warm russets and sunny golds, framing a face perfect in contour and with a complexion as soft as a moth's wing. And the beauty of this was now deepened, if possible, by the shadow upon it of puzzled pain and inquiry. An instant the gaze between them hung, then it broke as she turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow, hesitant gesture. With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that rushed through him—for he had not seen her there before that moment—something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties. The emptying room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his fingers. Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he did not recognise it. He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly understood. He had always regarded with wondering distaste the occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect of alcohol with which he was familiar in men of his class, and the vulgar spree filled him with disgust. He was nicely abstemious at his club and he had never entered a saloon in his life. His indulgences, deeper and more and more frequent as they had grown of late, had been hidden behind the shades of his inner office, and the liquor he had drunk there he had never carried in his legs. For him these cloistered hours had meant no harrowing aftermath of remorse, no shrinking memory of license or ribaldry, but only the strange mental exaltation that had borne him to success. He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.

He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand. He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed by sullen scowl and sneering bravado—a concrete fact, perturbing and vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.

With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop, if it's a thousand miles!"

As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.

"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!"

CHAPTER II

A MAN AND A WOMAN

The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of feeling. She was nonplussed. She had entered for that last hour sharing intuitively the general belief that the prisoner would be acquitted: a belief, founded like that of the rest, upon her knowledge of his counsel. She had seen no straining for the spectacular in what some had been wont to call "Harry Sevier's pyrotechnics," and on past occasions on which she had heard him address a jury she had fallen wholly under the spell of that peculiar magnetism that swayed all alike. Aside from his continuous success in a calling with which her whole life had been associated—her father, Judge Beverly Allen, was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and his father had been Chancellor before him—with his brilliant way, his undenied leadership among his fellows, he had been to her a dominant personality. She had not lacked the masculine homage of a dozen others of their set, but Harry Sevier had always been the imminent figure in her thought, and it had needed no spoken word or promise between them to link her imagination wholly to a future in which he reigned supreme. So that his failure to-day had affected her strongly.

On the dusky court house steps she stopped to exchange greetings with a group who chatted there. They were full of the puzzle of Sevier's failure, or laughingly rueful at their own discomfiture, and she stopped but a moment before a negro coachman tucked her into a carriage. As he climbed lumberingly to his seat and gathered up the reins, a heavy, assured figure approached the curb. Cameron Craig was big and broad and in his strong and arrogant face lines of conflict had early etched themselves. He shook hands with her with a smile.

"I didn't know you were in town," she said, with a trace of aloofness.

"I'm here for only a day or two," he answered. "I had to talk a little politics with my attorney, Mr. Treadwell. It's his busy day, it seems, and as the mountain couldn't come to Mahomet, Mahomet came to the mountain. So here I am at the halls of justice. It's been an entertaining afternoon—the trial, I mean—but upon my word, I thought at first I had strayed into a convention of the Daughters of the Confederacy."

She smiled, but it came with difficulty. "Oh, court has become a social dissipation with us. It competes now with auction-bridge and the fox-trot."

"You tempt me to steal a purse or two," he said. "I love to hold the centre of the stage. The only thing I've been charged with stealing so far is an election, but one never knows to what heights he may rise. If I pick your pocket will you come to my trial?"

"If it were my pocket, I'd have to, wouldn't I?"

He bowed smilingly and turned away, as the coachman flicked the tossing manes with the tip of his whip. Looking over her shoulder, while the horses whirled her away, Echo saw his big frame swinging up the steps into the emptying building, every move expressive of virile strength and conscious power.

These were traits Cameron Craig had acquired through direct inheritance. His father had come penniless, to a small town in the adjoining state where, with calm assurance and without unnecessary delay, he had married the neighbourhood's prettiest girl and pre-empted a worn-out iron deposit with a tumble-down furnace, relic of a series of disgusted British owners. With the same certainty of judgment he had uncovered the lost ore, developed the property till it paid a miraculous dividend, and died. He had been a man of one idea—the "Works"—and had known and cared for nothing else. The son, however, with his father's force and will, had inherited, with less praiseworthy traits, a further ambition. The young Cameron Craig's first free act after his schooling ended was to dispose of the iron plant and to throw his money and his brain together into a group which now stood back of the great Public Services Corporation that held in control the vested interests of two states, exclusive of the railroads. At thirty he was a personality that loomed large in organised politics, and might be depended on to loom steadily larger to the end of the chapter.

As he entered the old building now he was thinking of the face of the girl he had just left, with its brilliant beauty and flashing youth.

"Why not?" he said to himself. "She has birth and breeding, but I can match them with things the world counts as high. I've never failed yet to get what I wanted—if I wanted it enough!" His thoughts recurred to the trial and to Harry Sevier. "Curious that nobody seemed to guess what the matter was—none but me. But I know what that look back of his eyes meant. The young fool! To have that gift—every thing right in his hand—and then to throw it away. For that's what it will come to, sure as fate, in the end!"

A hand fell upon his shoulder. It was Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, and he followed the latter into a private room and sat down. "Have you got the new committee list?" he asked, without preamble.

For answer the other took a closely written paper from his pocket and handed it over. "Senator Colby sent it down by his secretary this morning."

Craig drew his chair to the table and began to make pencilled changes and corrections, his hand moving swiftly and unhesitatingly. "There," he said, returning it. "That will be better. Let the senator have it back to-morrow." He sat a moment silent, his strong white fingers drumming on the table. "By the way, is this young Sevier likely to take a hand in the next campaign?"

"I don't know," replied the other. "I've always expected him to burst into politics some day. He has a curious hold on people—a wonderful magnetism. To-day's is the first jury case I've ever known him to lose. He as well as let it go by default. How he came to handle it so beats me!"

Craig might have enlightened him, but he did not.

"I've concluded we don't want him," he said. "He's uneven: the trial to-day proved that. Besides, he's too high-chinned—we can't depend on his type to obey orders. We are coming to a big fight and we want the docks clear. No overtures to him. We must cut out every man whose absolute footing we can't count on till the day of judgment."

The attorney lit a cigar and regarded its blue haze thoughtfully before he answered. "All right," he agreed. "I should have picked him for good material. But you're the doctor."

Meanwhile the carriage was whirling Echo Allen over the darkening asphalt. The tired night lay still, watching under dusky lids, the moon, a great blown magnolia, floating in the limpid sky. As the horses pounded on, the coachman's voice broke in upon her revery:

"Reck'n Marse Harry done got dat man clar, Miss Echo, lak he allus do?"

She drew her furs closer about her throat with a little gesture as though dismissing a baffling problem. "No, 'Lige; not this time."

"Sho' now!" he exclaimed, looking back with his thick, blue-black lips framed to a whistle. "Muss-a been pow'ful guilty ef he couldn't git him off. Ah reck'n dem yuthah lawyahs 'cluded dey wanter tek Marse Harry down—he done put it ovah dem so off'n—en dey jes' tek dat 'cused man, en fool eroun', en fool eroun', tell dey done prove it on him!"

But 'Lige's sage reflection upon the situation brought no smile to Echo Allen's face.

At length the horses came to a great double-gate, lighted with heavy wrought-iron lamps, opening on a curving drive, into which they turned, to swing panting up to a wide-porched mansion set in a grove of oaks and acacias. This was "Midfields," the home of the Allens for four generations and of the Beverlys before them. Its wide wings and columned front spoke of old colony days, as did its name of a time when rolling acres of tobacco instead of suburban streets surrounded it. Twilight was drifting thickly over it now, and the box-hedged garden, with its plenteous rose-shrubs and wild sun-dial, was purpled with shadow.

Echo jumped down without assistance and ran into the hall, throwing off her hat and coat and pausing before a glass to pat into place the rebellious whorls of her springing, gold-brown hair before she entered the dimly-lighted library.

It was a wide, pleasant room, with tradition and gentle birth in every line of its furnishing. The table held an old China lamp of gilt and lapis-lazuli blue, and the simple, colonial book-cases were of rich-veined mahogany which held the same shimmering, tawny lights as Echo's hair and had leaded-glass doors in key with the silver, glass-prismed candle-sticks on the mantel-piece. A huge old English screen of painted leather stood at one side. On the dull green walls were framed steel engravings of the ancestral home of the Allens in Dorsetshire and of that sturdy ancestor, in lace and peruke, whose rugged signature is on the Declaration. The place had but one modern touch—a splendid portrait of Echo herself that hung between two great windows—the canvas whose photograph at that moment lay face-down in Harry Sevier's inner office.

In the room sat her father, the Judge, perusing a magazine. He was a pale, placid man, straight and grey as a silver-birch, with ivory, distinguished features that suggested an old daguerreotype and seemed to call for a silk-velvet waistcoat and a stock. He tossed the magazine aside as she came to him and stooping, in a swift birdlike way she had, dropped a kiss on the top of his billowy, grey hair.

"There you are," she chided, "ruining your poor eyes with fine print in this wretched light!"

She turned the reading-lamp higher and drew the curtains. As she pulled the heavy folds together they swept from its place a heavy brass bowl filled with Marechal Niel roses, and it fell with a crash onto a frail Italian desk of dark rosewood quaintly inlaid with designs in lighter colour, which sat in a corner.

She sprang to catch it with a cry. "I'm as bad as Uncle Nelson!" she exclaimed. "How lucky it didn't spill!" She set the bowl back and passed a hand along the polished desk-top, frowning. "It has made a terrific dent in the poor old thing!" she said, remorsefully. "It must have jarred it frightfully. I'm so sorry!" She looked at her father, who had half risen at her cry. "You were always fond of the little old desk, though you never used it. I used to love it when I was a child. It was so mysterious, with its tiny cubby-holes and carvings. Some one told me once that such foreign desks always had secret drawers and I used to spend hours trying to find one. Where did it come from? Did it belong to grandfather?"

"No. It was willed to me many years ago by—a friend. It was when you were a baby."

"How curious," she said, "for a man to choose a piece of furniture like that! Why, it's as feminine as a toilet-table!" She came and perched one small toe on the fender, as he asked: "Where's Nancy!"

"I haven't seen her since luncheon. She was going to tea at Cora Spottiswoode's."

"Her father has written me she must come home at the end of the week," said the Judge. "He says if she doesn't he'll start an action against somebody for kidnapping—says nobody can fix his coffee just right but her."

She smiled. The two families were life-long friends and since their boarding-school days she and Nancy Langham had exchanged annual visits. "I'll tell her," she said. "I wish she could stay longer, though it's lonely for her father, no doubt. I love to have her here. She's—fond of Chilly, and I've been hoping it—might have an influence over him."

The Judge sighed. The name of Chisholm Allen, Echo's twin-brother, was a synonym in the city for debonair devil-may-care. With the likeliness that kept him popular even among those staid members of society who did not countenance his peccadillos, he combined a negligence and dissipation that from his boyhood had made him a thorn-in-the-flesh to his father.

"Yes," he said, "she's fond of him. That's why I think she shouldn't stay too long."

There was silence for a moment. Then he said in a lighter tone, "I wonder how Sevier's case came out. It was expected to finish to-day, wasn't it?"

"Oh," she answered, "he lost. The jury found against him. I was there for an hour, just at the end."

He made an exclamation of surprise, and stole a quick glance at her, but she had bent down to straighten a shoe-buckle and he could not see her face. "Ah well," he said, "it won't do him any harm to get a set-back now and then. Perhaps he needs it. Were there many there?"

"Half the world," she answered. "I saw Cameron Craig."

"So he is in town, eh? I must send a note to the hotel and ask him to luncheon to-morrow."

She was silent and he said quizzically. "Come, my dear, you mustn't be such a chin-tilted patrician. 'Other times, other manners.' Craig has his place, and it's not a low one, either."

She made a move of impatience. "He's a member of the best clubs in his own city, and all that, I know. He belongs there. But here it is different. We are not beholden to him. Why should we go out of our way to treat him like one of us? He isn't, really. He may be a University man and he may have travelled all over the world. Yes, and I'll admit he has manners—a manner, if you like—too. But there's something that keeps him an outsider just the same. Besides, people tell unpleasant tales about him."

Her father cleared his throat. Gossip had been prolific in tales of Craig as regarded the fairer—and frailer—sex. He had heard the stories—unsavoury ones, such as inevitably cling to men, whatever their business or social standing, who acquire the whispered reputation of the voluptuary. He had himself, however, a singular reserve of judgment, coupled with an impatient intolerance of scandal. Men to him were as he found them, till the event proved otherwise.

"I know what you mean," he said judicially. "He hasn't our traditions and standards. That's true. He's not born to them. But this is an uncharitable world, my dear, and half the tattle one hears is apt to be sheer envy. He is a person of importance. He has a good deal of influence, as well as money, and is affiliated with men with whom a large part of my earlier life was associated."

She hardly heard his closing words: "Influence and money!" she repeated, with a little shrug. "Why need we bother about them! The Judiciary, thank heaven! has nothing to do with political influence, and as for money, I should hate to think that what we have came, like his, from the United Distilleries!"

"Echo!" The name fell sharply behind them.

Both turned—the Judge a little self-consciously—to where his wife stood in the doorway. She was already dressed for dinner and her dark corsage set off her white neck and beautifully rounded shoulders—a cool, statuesque woman, of unfailing poise and manner, with her grey hair perfectly disposed above a complexion whose tinting was the despair of many a younger matron. Instinctively the girl's hand had crept into the Judge's arm, and insensibly the two had drawn a shade nearer together.

Mrs. Allen stood looking at them a moment, faintly smiling, before she said deliberately, "That is a ridiculous way of talking. Please let me remind you that your father was the Trust's counsel for many years, and until he went on the Bench."

"Oh, I forgot—" she began, distressed. "I only meant—"

"There, there!" the Judge said, frowning. "People feel differently about those things. You have a perfect right to think in that way, if you choose."

"I couldn't think anything you did was wrong," she cried passionately. "And, anyway, giving a company legal advice is very far from being in its business. Every one has to have lawyers, of course. They defend even criminals."

He smiled quizzically at her argument. "Well," he countered, "I'm respectable in my old age, at any rate." He had pressed a bell as he spoke and to the grizzled negro who now entered he said, "Nelson, has your Marse Chilly come in yet? If he has I'd like to see him."

The old man shook his head. "Marse Chilly done tellyfoam he won' be home fo' dinnah, suh."

The Judge pulled his chin, palpably annoyed, but quick to his resentful mood, Echo laid her hand caressingly on his arm.

"Never mind, dear," she said coaxingly. "Don't fret about Chilly."

Mrs. Allen's voice interposed. "Chilly sent me the message an hour ago," she said, with an accent that seemed finally to dismiss the topic. "I think you would better dress now, Echo. Nancy has been in some time, and dinner's at seven-thirty."

CHAPTER III

THE AWAKENING

An automobile speeding through the starry dark! No hesitant progress through congested traffic, no frequent swerving for daylight wayfarers. The city was far behind now—only the clear, well-nigh deserted road, winding like a tremulous magenta ribbon through the swooping gloom that seemed to shrink and cringe from the metal monster hurtling after its golden halo through the eddying dust.

A practised hand was on the throttle and the yellow-lined face bent over the wheel was shrewd and keen. There had been no supper for Bob that night and no evening at Black Joe's billiard parlour, but the chauffeur knew his master. "Go like the devil till I tell you to stop," the other had said, and without the word from the moveless figure on the rear seat, he would obey till the engine stopped or his hand went numb on the wheel. Hamlets flashed by—huddles of flaring street-lights—then shadow and blankness again. Now and then a hollow rumbling marked a bridge, or a jovial, beckoning doorway betokened a road-house. Ten, twenty, thirty miles. A turn of the wheel and the car swept into a divergent highway. Another mile and again a turn—Bob was shuttling back and forth now, fearful of an impossible distance from home.

The man behind him sat as if graven in stone. At first, while his senses instinctively resisted the intoxication, Harry had been conscious only of blind movement, a frantic flight to escape the unescapable. Yet his whole body was tense, his eyes never wavered, his hand was as steady as his chauffeur's. He was sharply conscious of all about him, every sense recording its message unerringly. He felt the wind-flung dust, heard the chatter of the exhaust, grasped acutely at each detail of sight and sound in the reeling panorama through which they passed with such arrow-like swiftness, under a sky that was a wild, blue field of silver flowers. Yet the governance of the mind, the sole arena in which the intoxicant ravened and rioted, the logical faculty to which sense-impression is but material, was astray. And at length the intoxication had wholly conquered.

And with the acknowledged dominance of the sinister thing that held him, the mental turmoil had swiftly stilled. There had come sudden composure—a strange, appalling peace, in which was no appreciation of place or time or fact, but yet a curious exaltation, a sensation of seeing not through a glass darkly, but with a further mental vision which knew no material bars.

Three hours, four hours—and still no sign. Bob stole a glance behind him. "Wonder what's the matter?" he muttered. "He sure never did want to go hell-bent-for-election like this before. Lucky I filled the tank plumb full this morning. She's good for another forty mile, I reckon."

As he withdrew his eyes he became aware of a red light swinging down into the road—a railway-crossing. He threw himself forward on the gear and with a grinding roar the brakes took hold. Plunging and shuddering, the car stopped dead, its forward lamps jingling against the warning bar.

With the sudden stop Harry lurched forward. And, curiously, with the abrupt cessation of motion and roar, the vast, vague distance through which his mind had been shuttling, closed instantly up. The baleful intoxication had lifted as it had come. He did not wake fully at once, for the breaking of the spell left him in a strange confusion through which he saw but dimly the outlines of the real present. He found himself sitting dazed and shaken in his motor—staring at the broad back of his chauffeur beyond which, an isolated point in the darkness of the night, swung the angry red lantern of the crossing. He put a hand to his forehead—what was he doing there?

It was coming back to him. He remembered the straining trial, the hour in his inner office—with the little wall-cabinet! He saw the crowded courtroom, saw himself standing impotent before the bar, saw the despairing face of the man beside him, the puzzled countenances about him, the dim lamps. He heard verdict and sentence. He saw himself turn to gaze into the face of the girl across the court-room—knew the swift rush of the motor, the blazing arc lights and that final stab of realisation!

His lips tightened to shut back something like a groan, as there rushed upon him a sense of horror, of disgust, of shame. The Harry Sevier he had been—the Harry Sevier of good repute, of disdain for the intemperate, of brilliant accomplishment and regular habit, was gazing with horrified eyes at the Harry Sevier he had unwittingly become, the slave of the spirit he had so long invoked, whose coarse debauch had to-day betrayed his client, and sent an innocent man to the wretched cell of a convict!

He spoke. "Bob, where are we?"

The chauffeur stole a quick glance behind him—there was relief in it. "Penitentiary-Crossing, sir," he said. "There's the Black Maria." He pointed to one side, where the gloomy vehicle, a wheeled ark with a narrow barred window set in its rear, waited with its patient mules.

The train was at the crossing now and the rumble of the brakes swelled to a vibrant screech, the long dotted line of dimly-lighted windows shuddering to a stop right athwart the road. A train-man with a lantern jumped down, followed by a couple of passengers. Harry opened the door of the tonneau and suddenly conscious that he was stiff and aching in every joint, achieved the ground and took a step toward the train.

Two figures just then emerged from the glare. He saw that they were linked together by a wrist and as the coat of one blew aside, the lights of the motor glinted from a nickel star—the badge of a deputy-sheriff. They had passed him, and the train was moving again to the chug-chug of the engine, when the officer turned back, biting the end from a cigar.

"Could you give me a light?" he asked.

"Certainly." Sevier took a silver match-box from his pocket.

The other struck the match, hauling irritably at his lagging prisoner, and the red light, flaring up, for an instant showed the two faces, the sheriff's grim and tenacious, and the one beside it—a white, dogged face, with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.

Sevier shrank as though at a blow in the face. He drew a sharp breath, for the sight pierced to the excoriate spot that lay like a live coal in his soul. There before him stood his client of that day's trial, on the last lap of his dismal journey, the man whom he, Harry Sevier, had sent there! Back of this man of the law, with his gleaming star and pocket revolver, he saw himself standing, the real mainspring of that blatant enginery.

The flare of the match fell. "Well, good night to you," said the deputy-sheriff.

"Hold on," said Harry. "Can a prisoner use money?"

"They're not supposed to, but I reckon money talks as loud in a concrete cell as anywhere else."

Sevier had taken some crisp yellow-backs from his pocket and now he held them out—to the jailbird. "Here!" he said. "Take this."

The other looked at the bills with a suddenly contorted face, then with a whirl of his unfettered hand dashed them on the ground. "Keep your money!" he snarled. "I'm a thief—that's what I am now! When I want money I'll steal it!"

The sheriff made an exclamation, and jerked viciously on the tethered wrist. "Don't you mind, sir," he said. "You mean it well, but this is an ugly one. Lord love you, they'll soon take that out of him over there! Come along, you," he added to the other, pulling him toward the Black Maria, "and if you open your face like that I'll give you what for!"

Sevier stood an instant looking dully after them, then mechanically picked up the fallen bills, fumblingly replaced them in his pocket, and climbed into the motor. He felt his face suddenly hot. In those flung words his judicial mind recognised the indictment. From the little wall-cabinet in his inner-office had crept a thing of shame and humiliation to himself. He saw this now suddenly swell and grow—as did the vapour from the fisherman's cruse—to a blighting, tentacled thing, reaching interminably into the future, holding in its coils a human life of pain, of desperate warfare, of social outlawry.

He sat down on the leather cushions like one in a dream.

"Home now, Bob," he said, heavily.

CHAPTER IV

THE PRODIGAL

At Midfields that evening the late moonlight poured a flood of radiance on the wide columned porch with its climbing roses where Echo sat on the step, chin in hand, absorbed in her own thought. She was alone. Nancy had slipped off to bed, her mother had retired to her room and her father to the quiet of the library and his reading.

From the kitchens she could hear the muffled clash of table-silver and the strident voice of Aunt Emily the cook, grumbling at Nelson: "Yo'-all hurry erlong wid dem ar fawks, now! Speck ah's gwine wait heah all night, yo' triflin' trash, yo'? Yo' heah me—yo' ain' blind! What yo' 'spose Marse Bev'ly pay yo' fo', anyhow?" From far down the road, beyond the gates, she could hear the faint twang of a guitar and the refrain of strolling, darky voices:

"Reign! Reign! Reign-a mah Lawd!
Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!
Reign salvation in-a mah soul,
Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!"

These died away with the sharp, eager bark of a dog. Then at length distinguishable sounds faded and there was only the deep, somnolent peace of the southern night, with the scent of the roses wreathing the garden with their intense, mystical odour—only the faint stirring of little leaves playing hide-and-seek with their shadows, and the thin, fairy tone-carpet woven by the myriad looms of night insects for near whispers to tread on.

Since that homeward ride she had had no time to ponder upon the event of the day. At dinner the trial had been touched upon but casually. Now that she was alone, however, it had rushed uppermost in her thought. It was not that Harry Sevier had lost the verdict: but his speech had seemed to her, in the tension of the crisis, with a man's honour and liberty at stake, inconsequential and almost flippant. And in the measure of her disappointment she had realised anew the depth of her regard for him. Again and again she pictured the scene in the courtroom but each time her thought returned upon itself, baffled and puzzled.

At length, with a long breath that was almost a sigh, she stirred, and rising, passed into the library where the Judge sat in the arm-chair by his reading lamp. "You're a disgraceful night-owl," she said, "and I refuse to keep you in countenance any longer."

He smiled at her. "That's right, Sorrel-Top! It's time for beauty-sleep if you and Nancy are off to ride in the morning. Just give me my eye-shade, will you, before you go?"

She brought the green crescent and snapped it on his forehead. "There! You haven't told me how you like my dress to-night. It's a new one."

He looked. "It's beautiful."

She turned about before him. "I do choose well sometimes, don't I?"

"You do everything well, my dear." In his tone now was a quaint and curious humility which always touched her when she discerned it—something of utter fondness and dependance—and she smoothed his iron-grey hair, one of her characteristic endearments, as she kissed him good night.

Upstairs Echo opened the door of her room softly. It was hung in blue—that shade which one sees in a Gainsborough ribbon, a Romney sash or a Reynolds sky—and its furniture was of simple white, with large pink dahlias trailing over the chintz window-curtains and chair-cushions. In the dim night-light the triple mirror of the dresser reflected the carven four-post bed, in one of whose pillows Nancy's dark head was already buried.

"Is that you, Echo?"

"Yes, it's I. Were you asleep already?"

"Almost," yawned Nancy. "I shall be in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Has Chilly come home yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Do you think he's really at the club, Echo?"

"Of course I do."

"Men are so queer!" sighed Nancy, drowsily. "We had such a lovely evening—all except Chilly's not being there."

Echo slipped off her gown and drew out the pins from her hair, letting it fall in a shimmering cloud to her waist. Then in the moon-light she drew a deep chair before the open window and began to brush out that wonderful mass of stirring gold that curled and waved about her bare, round shoulders. Below her the garden lay, a mass of olive shadows, wound in cloudy golds and misty greens, sprinkled with moon-dust and drenched with the dizzying scent of roses and honeysuckle. All was lapped in the utter quiet of the night—only the swift wing of a night-bird shook the darker clump of ivy that marked the sun-dial. A long time she sat there, the brush parting and smoothing the bronze mesh with long sweeping movements, gazing into the whisper-haunted gloom and listening to the measured breathing of the girl behind her that seemed to form a rhythmical current for her own thoughts.

All at once in the hush there came the clashing of the gate at the foot of the drive and jovial "good-byes," mingled with a hilarious voice asseverating that its owner had had "the time of his young life."

She bit her lip. "It's Chilly!" she whispered, with a frowning look over her shoulder.

She listened intently. There was the crunch of an uncertain step on the gravel, the sound of a stumble from the porch—then the slamming of the front door.

The dulled sound reverberated through the old house. It roused Nancy and she sat upright in the drift of silken coverlets, her eyes heavy with sleep. "Is it Chilly?"

"Yes. He has just come in."

"Is he—?"

"I'm afraid so, dear."

The younger girl caught her breath. "Oh, I hope your father has gone to bed. He's so hard on him!"

Echo turned. "How can he be otherwise?" she said, sadly. "It's so often and often it happens, nowadays. Won't you try and influence him? He cares for you, darling!"

Nancy's hands were clasped tight about her knees. She stirred uneasily. "How can I, Echo? A boy has to have a little bit of a good time once in awhile. I wouldn't want him to be a molly-coddle! He won't be any the worse for it when he gets older and settled down."

"The worse for it!" The words fell sadly. "Don't you think he is the worse for it already? He's making no progress with his law-study and he's been two years out of college, now. There's nothing to blame but his drinking—and the company he keeps. What will be the end of it? Oh, Nancy, you have a responsibility. Every woman has with some one man. If women only wouldn't countenance it as they do!"

"But, Echo—you talk as if Chilly was—as if you thought he was doing something disgraceful. Why, he's a gentleman; he couldn't be anything but that, no matter what he did!"

Echo came to the bed and sat down beside the other. In her filmy night-gown, wound in the mist of her loosened gold shadowed hair she looked like some ethereal thing in the moonlight.

"Ah, that's just what so many say! That a gentleman is a gentleman whether he is drunk or sober! It's not so with other things. Is a gentleman a gentleman whether he lies, or cheats at cards, or not? Isn't there to be any standard, really? Don't you see that there never will be any penalty—as far as drinking is concerned—until women make it? Listen, Nancy. The year I came out, I went to a dance—my first big one. There was a boy there who followed me about all over the floor. He wanted me to dance with him, and he was—he could hardly walk. At first I was frightened, but at last I grew angry. I asked a lady why he was not asked to leave the floor. She seemed quite astonished and indignant. 'But,' she said, 'don't you know who he is? That's the son of General Moultrie!' It was Cale Moultrie. You know what became of him, don't you?"

"Yes." Nancy's voice was muffled. "But Chilly—"

"Oh, my dear, there was a time when Cale drank no more than the others, and everybody liked him—as they do Chilly. It's coming to be the same with him, I'm afraid. There's no penalty for him yet because he's Chisholm Allen—because he's father's son!"

She stopped, caught by the sound of a sob. In another moment her arms were around the frail little body and the flower-like face was pressed hard against her breast.

"I don't care if he is d-d-dissipated," said Nancy passionately. "I'd rather have him come to me d-d-drunk than any other man sober! He's just Ch-Ch-Chilly, all the same!"

CHAPTER V

THE UNLAID GHOST

On the ground floor of the old house all was silent save in the dining-room, where a single electric bulb threw into garish relief the dismantled table with a bowl of fern glowing like a fountain of emeralds against the dark wood. It lighted the Chippendale sideboard, before which Chisholm Allen confronted old Nelson, the butler. A cut-glass decanter of sherry was in one hand; the other was alternately fumbling uncertainly with the stopper and pushing back the persuasive fingers of the aged negro. His straw hat was tipped awry, his face was flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright. He was laughing immoderately.

"You old black stick-in-the-mud!" he said. "What's the matter with you? Think you own that decanter, eh? Well, you don't, not by a long shot. I do—Chris'mas present from the Duchess. Hope to die if it wasn't. Leggo, you virtuous old chicken-thief, and give me a tumbler!"

"Now, Marse Chilly!" The low voice was deprecating and appealing, and there was love in it too—the deep, changeless affection of the old-time negro for his white master. "Yo' knows yo' don' want no mo' dat ar. Yo' done had er plenty at dat ole club down town. Ef yo' tuck away any mo' now, yo' gwine have er haid lak er rainbar'l on yo' shouldahs in dee mawnin'! Yo' knows yo' is!"

Chilly's hand dragged at the black detaining fingers. "What do you know about heads? Take your fool hands away, I tell you! I'm only going to take a couple of swallows."

"Ah knows dem ar swallers," pleaded the old man. "Yo' go erlong tuh baid. Hit's long pas' midnight. Marse Bev-ly's in dee lib'ry."

"Oh bother!" said Chilly irreverently. "He's gone to bye-bye long ago. Shut your face or you'll wake him up."

"Fo' dee Lawd, Marse Chilly!" stuttered the old man. "Ah heahs him comin' now! Ah sho' does!"

"You can't bamboozle me!" laughed Chilly. "Old Huckleberry's been snoozing this hour! If he does come, you and I'll drink his health. Eh? Wonder what he'd say!"

He was not to be left in doubt, for at the moment the hall-door opened. His father stood on the threshold. He was dressed and the green eyeshade was on his forehead.

"We will dispense," he said in a tone of quiet hardness, "with a ceremony which, however filial, is somewhat ill-timed. Nelson, I think you needn't wait up any longer."

"Yas, Marse Bev'ly. Yas, suh." The old man went to the door, hesitated and came back. "Is yo' sho' yo' don' want nothin' else, Marse Bev'ly?"

"Nothing further, Nelson."

"Yas, suh. Good night, Marse Bev'ly. Good night, Marse Chilly." This time he went out, closing the door behind him with exaggerated caution.

"Come now, Judge," said his son, still mirthfully. "There's no masonic funeral going on in the bungalow, is there? Can't one have a harmless night-cap without being excommunicated?"

His father looked at him from under the green shade with gloomy disapproval. The address did not tend to mend matters; his son was wont to reserve the judicial title for moods of especial mellowness such as to-night's. He noted the flushed face and sparkling eyes, the general air of goodnatured recklessness that so clearly spoke the nature of the other's evening's pleasure.

"We'll discuss that to-morrow." He crossed to the wall and laid his hand on the electric switch. "Good night."

Chisholm still smiled without apparent resentment. "I guess you weren't ever as young as I am, Judge, anyway. You seem to think I'm a rotten bad lot just because I like to take a glass now and then and go out with the boys. You drink your mint-julep all right enough. And I'll bet whoever you had to dinner to-night took as much as I've had under my vest. The only difference is I haven't had any dinner. It does make a difference, I assure you."

His father's hand was still extended to the wall. "I said good night, Chisholm."

Chilly shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, what's the use?" he said listlessly, and went unsteadily out by the rear door.

The Judge snapped off the switch, and putting out the light in the library, ascended the stair. The hard look had deepened on his face. As he gazed at that nonchalant epitome of ribaldry he had thought of other men who had so often been grouped about the table in that room—men of tempered habit, of standing and achievement. His own son had contempt for such company. It bored him. He preferred to "go out with the boys" and to come home in the small hours—as he had to-night. So he was thinking as he entered the room above. There he stopped in surprise, for across the threshold stood his wife. She was in her night-gown, over which she had thrown a robe of pale crêpe with lace at the neck and wrists. Her face showed a heightened colour and her lips were trembling. He drew forward a chair.

"I thought you were asleep long ago," he said.

She declined the seat with a gesture. "I heard your voices. What did you say to Chilly?"

"I said 'Good night,'" he answered heavily. "That was about all."

Her lip curled. The glance she gave him was critically cold. When she married Beverly Allen she had loved him—in so far as she had been capable of loving. To her marriage had meant the assumption of woman's predestined place in the social fabric, the inevitable change of habit which time brings to all, with its widened orbit and opportunities. She had been drawn to him by every instinct of selection which took count of name, standing, worldly endowment and mental equipment; but there had been behind it no throb of maidenly impulse, no thrill of the great current that feeds the romance of the world. The one point at which life for her caught and focused had been the son, whose misconduct stood so sharply out against the spotless Allen name. He was her one weakness, her love for him an unreasoning passion that had swayed her from his birth. To her his transgressions showed as venial, his delinquencies as but the forgivable errors of youth. The few instances in which he had been openly called to task by his father had been sharpened in the latter's memory by her resentment. But on none of these occasions had her husband seen her so moved as now. He did not know that for many minutes she had stood on the dark landing listening to the murmurous voices, and that now she resented what seemed to her a deliberate evasion. She spoke with slow, even point:

"As a monologist Chilly is a distinct surprise. Was he saying 'good night' also?"

Under the unaccustomed anger of her voice the Judge's pale face flushed. He took off the eyeshade and set it on the table, as he replied evenly:

"Chilly is not himself to-night, Charlotte. Does it matter particularly what he said?"

Beneath his voice now there was a kind of subterranean compassion, a note almost of entreaty, as though in this trouble that touched them both he could have wished to comfort her, if, indeed, she had made that possible.

She made an involuntary movement—not a sign that a chord had been touched, but rather a mark of agitation. Chilly was the one subject upon which she could not bring to bear the tempered reason which otherwise marshalled her even life. It seemed to her now that she was being thrust aside, in the interest of some new plan of discipline and coertion. She turned swiftly on her husband.

"I suppose you think it should make no difference to me!" Her eyes blazed. "You are so sure you understand Chilly! You—his father—have you ever really known him all his life? Does he ever come to you when he is in trouble or needs advice?"

Her voice held a bitter sarcasm and again the flush swept up the Judge's pale face. But his voice was emotionless as he said, "Chilly never felt the need of advice from any one. He goes his own sweet way."

"That is just it!" she said. "You set yourself so far above him. You have such a contempt for his pleasures and so thoroughly despise the company he keeps. Suppose he has a taste for liquor. He is still a gentleman, I believe. But you, with your solemn rectitude and your touch-me-not self-righteousness—you would drive him to the very people and places he ought to keep away from!"

He stared at her. "I have never regarded my repugnance to his habits as inducing him to further excesses," he said slowly. "Nor have I set myself up as preacher. Perhaps I have never understood him as—you do. I only know that his ways are not my ways. He has had every advantage that education and environment can confer. He is older than I was when I began practice. But what is he making of his life? He thinks of nothing but playing fast and loose at country-houses and loafing at the club and acting the fop and the fool generally!"

Her shaking hand was plucking at the lace at her throat. His every word had been a live coal laid to her resentment. "Is that the worst you can say of him?" she asked. "Can't you call him sot or black-leg?"

"Not yet." He was feeling now a dull anger at her scorn, at her persistent disapproval. The throb of sympathy he had first felt had been frozen by her icy reproach. "There are other things I wish to be able to say of my son. I want him to be more than a decorative philanderer. I want him to be a man—one to whom men may look for manliness, and women for honour!"

She had grown pale to the lips. "'And women for honour!'" she repeated. "As I looked to—you!"

He had flung out his arm with a characteristic gesture, but at her last words it suddenly stiffened and remained, as if it had been frozen in the air. Slowly it dropped at his side as he stared at her with ashen face—a look of shocked and disconcerted inquiry. For the exclamation, as at the swift slash of a blade, had torn away a veil, woven of time and habit, that covered an old wound. For twenty years by tacit consent this hidden thing of the past had never been acknowledged by any word or deed between them. Now a single sentence had laid it bare, quick and quivering and mutually confessed. They had been married twenty-two years, and if in that early period he had discerned any lack in her, he had given her no reproaches. On her part, she had fulfilled what she esteemed her whole duty, and in her own mind stood blameless. And he had had his profession. But in the end starved nature had reasserted itself. There had come to him a passion, swift and terrible while it lasted, to which he had surrendered wholly—till death swept it from him. The gall and wormwood had been sweetened then by the birth, in merciful coincidence with that loss, of his twin children. He had thought the episode buried forever from sight and hearing, but a later chance had discovered it to his wife, and in her own immaculateness she had been able neither to forget nor to forgive. It had made no difference in her life before their world. Cold and perfect and correct, she had held her way, but from the day when she had faced him with his secret in her hand, their hearts had been strangers to one another. He had climbed high and she had risen with him. And in twenty years no word had fallen from her lips to open that old tomb—till to-night when the heavy doors swung ajar at the echo of that one exclamation.

"As I looked to—you!" There it was—the old ghost, called up to haunt his present as it had waylaid his past. His hand fumbled for the discarded eye-shade and adjusted it as he slowly said:

"I have never counted myself a pattern, Charlotte—least of all for my own son."

She caught the note of pain and weariness now in his voice, and something new and unaccustomed stirred for one brief moment in her heart. She had struck harder than she had intended. But she had lost control at a critical moment and old bitterness, that had never been tinctured with the sweetness of charity and forgiveness, had sharpened her tongue. Now his shocked white face smote her with a sense of self-reproach whose very strangeness threw her momentarily off her poise. For a fleeting second words trembled on her tongue that might have dissolved the icy barrier between them. But the golden second passed.

"That is generous," she said with a distant laugh.

"No doubt Chilly will profit by experience, if not by precept. Shall you be at court to-morrow?"

"Yes," he answered. "I have a hearing."

"You will prefer the horses, then," she said, turning to the door. "I will take the electric for my shopping. Good night."

He opened the door for her. "Good night," he said.

CHAPTER VI

THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT

In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand at his lips, as though he tasted blood. The summer night outside was very still. The curtain before one of the windows swayed gently in the air and from the acacia trees on the lawn he could hear the sleepy twitter of an oriole. He turned off the light and went into the hall. There at one side stood the white, panelled door of his wife's room. It was shut. It came to him that it stood for a perfect symbol of that cold immaculateness of hers which had so long denied him the living bread of sympathy. She could forgive anything in her son, but nothing in her husband. For twenty long years they two might have dwelt at opposite ends of the Milky Way, and it seemed to him suddenly monstrous, whatever the cause, whosesoever the fault, that they, being man and wife, should yet be so far apart.

He went slowly down the stair again, his hand, shaking a little, slipping along the polished banister. The dim night-light made the lower hall a place of ghostly shadows. He re-entered the library, moved to the table and turned on the reading-lamp. Then, lifting it to the limit of its silken cord, he threw the electric glow upon the canvas that hung above the mantel, studying it intently.

"Mine!" he muttered, with a sort of fierce satisfaction. "Mine, every inch—mine, not Charlotte's! My blood gave you that curve of brow and those full lips and that deep, dark blue of eye—they are of my side, not of hers! You, at least belong to me!"

He returned the lamp to its place, and turning, cast his glance at the little Italian desk in the corner. His lips trembled. At that desk she had sat—the woman knowledge of whom had sharpened the sword of his wife's never-dying disdain. The woman who had come into his life too late! He thought of their meetings, few enough, indeed. How often he had wondered how life would have turned for him, if at the end she had listened to his desperate pleading, and gone with him along that alluring way that had drawn him like an opal path among Italian asphodels, flinging to the winds social standing, reputation, career, friends, honour, all! If she had said "yes" to that wild letter he had sent her—the one to which she had vouchsafed no reply—which might have been written in his very heart's blood!

He looked again at the painted portrait of Echo, in her splendid youth and clean heritage: the answer was there.

He sat down before the little desk, stretched his arms upon it and bowed his head upon them. "You were right, Eleanor," he sighed. "You were right. But somehow it's been so long!"

He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up. There before him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper—a page closely written over in twirly, dim writing. He lifted it up and held it to the light, his nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead pansy's ghost—

No—no—no! Why did you write it? Why did you put it into words? For now I must keep it always. I cannot destroy it. You knew I would not—could not—-let you do what you beg me to! Never, never! I am not so mad. Nor are you, really. It is not your best self speaking in this letter. Sometime—

His gaze became fixed. He gave a hoarse cry—a mist was before his eyes. He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet—it was dated twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar! He laid the leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it:

Sometime you will thank me—will think of this only as a ghastly indiscretion from which you were caught away in time. We do not make the world we live in, and it is a thousand times stronger than we are. No, if we play the game we must stick to the rules. To think of overstepping that boundary, in such a desperate fashion, gives my fastidious sense a strange recoil—something like that curious shame and confusion that associates itself with a dream in which one finds one's-self scantily clad in the midst of wondering strangers! No—no! I do not think I shall send this letter—but perhaps I may at the end. For I am going away. I sail to-morrow. Shall I see you again—ever—ever? What will you think—

That was all. It broke off abruptly as though the writer had laid it aside, never to be finished.

In the silent library the Judge looked at that mute witness as at one risen from the dead. Twenty years of absence and silence—twenty years out of his ken, save to the thriving memory! For how long the hand that had penned those lines had been dust, yet the poor symbols of ink and paper persisted to confront him now! How had the sheet come to be on that desk that she had bequeathed him? It had not lain there a moment before.

He brought the lamp and examined the desk attentively, pulling out every tiny drawer, sounding each carved partition, twisting and tugging at every projecting portion of the ornamentation. With a thin, metal paper-knife he explored each warp and crevice. But his search was fruitless. If the leaf had slipped from some crack—loosened, perhaps, by the fall of the brass bowl upon it that day—the old desk kept its secret.

A strange feeling stole over him, the feeling of mystery that comes to one with some sudden apposition of incident that thrills with a sense of an overpowering meaning in a circumstance in itself banal and trivial. Something of her proud and passionate spirit she had etched into those lines. Might it be that spirit, somewhere in the great void, reached out to him through this silent witness—to say that love does not wholly die?

He gently spoke her name. "Eleanor! You forgave me for writing—that. If you hadn't you wouldn't have left me this desk when you—died, away over there in Florence! So I've got your letter at last."

He sighed again and groping for his big chair, sat down, with the sheet of paper spread out upon his knee.

On the upper floor Mrs. Allen tapped lightly on Chilly's door and when there was no answer, opened it softly and entered. At the whisper of his name he started up in bed.

"Duchess!" he exclaimed.

The pet name, as always, touched her. It was a perennial tribute to that stateliness and dignity which she had made her own. She came and sat down on the edge of the bed and he caught her hand and held it to his lips. "You shouldn't have come," he chided. "You'll take cold."

"I heard your father talking to you," she whispered. "You—you know what he dislikes so. Why can you not be—discreet?"

Chilly moved uneasily: "Oh, I know," he said. "But I can't always be giving an imitation of a quaker meeting! I'm not a child."

"You must not anger him," she said. "I—for my sake, I wish you would be more careful."

He patted her hand. "All right, Duchess! I'll mind my p's and q's. But you must go back to bed now. Don't you worry about me."

She bent down and kissed him on the forehead before she glided from the room.

CHAPTER VII

ARROWS OF DESIRE

"Here is the new rose," said Echo. "Its name is the Laurant Carle."

Cameron Craig looked—at her, not at the blossom. She was in simple white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental, tuned to the wonder and passion of living, her slim figure outlined against the dark green shrubbery and her face and gold-bronze hair touched with the slanting sunlight, she seemed herself some great, rare, golden flower in a silver sheath. Lines he had somewhere read sprang into his mind:

"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,"

and, contained man that he was, he caught his breath at the sudden leap in him of the thing that had been covered and hidden there so long, something fine and keen as flame, that set his habitually cool blood beating under his eyelids.

"It was not the rose," he said. "I had another reason in asking you to come here."

"Yes?" Her voice was evenly inquiring.

"It was to ask you if you will marry me."

She took a quick step backward; a look of amaze had sprung to her face. "I?" she exclaimed. "You want me to—marry you?"

"Yes. Is there anything strange in that?"

She looked away. In all her thoughts of the man before her there had not lurked this possibility. She had been bred among youth who, whatever their other vices, maintained a chivalric ideal of womankind which excluded fast-and-loose conduct; and the whispers that clung about Cameron Craig—set, as they were, over against his force and undeniably brilliant attainments—had lent her opinion of him a certain cold contempt. And now here he was—he of all men!—saying this to her! And it was no hasty impulse: she read that in the steady, confident eyes, the hard, heavy jaw, the steadfast, deep-lined face.

She felt his waiting gaze. "No," she answered, slowly. "Perhaps it is not strange. It is only that the unexpected seems so." She looked at him curiously. "Why did you ask me—to-day?"

"The opportunity came," he said. "It must have, sooner or later."

"So you have intended for some time to say this to me?"

"Since I first met you, a year ago," he answered. "You have two things that I want—as I have their complements."

She considered this a moment. "Forgive me," she said then, "but I am a very curious person—as well, it seems, as a very blind one. Would you mind telling me what are those two qualities that you imagine I possess, which you value so highly?"

"Breeding, first," he replied, "and all that it implies. You represent a stock."

She nodded gravely. "And the other desideratum?"

"Beauty. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

"And—the complements of these things, that you possess?"

"Money," he answered. "And the power it gives—the accessories which a woman like you must have if she would really live. I think you don't doubt that my wife shall have these things."

She shook her head. "Not in the least. Indeed, I am sure she will. But you see, Mr. Craig, I happen to be not at all the sort of person you think I am—the kind you wish to marry."

"I'll risk that!" he flung her.

"The proof is that you ask me—as you have. The things you have to offer seem overwhelmingly attractive to you, no doubt, but I'm afraid they mean much less to me." He could not see the look that was in her face now, for her head was turned away. "I have no longing for money. I could be contented in a mountain lean-to, with morning-glories instead of an orchid conservatory. I could cook my own meals on a gas-stove and live in one room over a hardware store—with the man I loved. I don't care particularly for what you call 'place' either. I could be happy enough on a prairie—with the man I loved. But love must be there, Mr. Craig."

"Do you doubt my love for you?" he asked.

"You had not cited it," she rejoined, calmly. "You spoke of money first—"

"Because I have lived long enough to know that it is the paramount requisite in most women's eyes."

"Your estimate of me by the mass was flattering," she said with gentle satire. "Have you been so busy making this wonderful money of yours that you think it can take the place of everything?"

He made an abrupt, almost angered, gesture. "Surely you know money means—has meant—nothing to me!" he exclaimed. "I am rich, yes. I dare say I could buy and sell almost any one you know. But it was never the main thing. It was winning that counted. It was the game, and money was only the counters. I played to win and I have won. And wealth was a stepping-stone to other things."

His voice had subtly altered and he drew closer to her where she stood, moveless and straight against the dark foliage, her gaze averted. "Then—I met you! I have known many women, but they have been nothing, less than nothing, to me! Business has been the only thing that really counted. But since I met you, the whole world has been changing for me. Even my work isn't the main thing to me any more. The main thing is you!"

She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the unexpected—touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience. His voice was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known. There was passion in it. She saw his big hand tremble.

"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted you! You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done! If this is love, then I love you—Echo, Echo!"

She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips. "Stop!" she said. "The love you talk of must be mutual. I do not—care for you in that way. I never could!"

"That makes no difference to me!" he protested. "I know what I want—I always have. And I want you."

"No," she said. "It is not the real me that you want, but we can pass that by. The important fact is that you have offered your last price and the bid is declined."

He looked at her with a sudden flash in his eyes. "Do I deserve that?" He had grown pale to the lips.

"Yes, you do. I have told you that I should never love you. Yet that means less than nothing to you. You have apparently not considered my possible love as a requisite in the case. It is 'breeding' you want, and beauty—and for that you make your offer. You propose purchase, not exchange, Mr. Craig. Well, I am not for sale!"

He flushed to his hair a dark, heavy red. He appeared to be controlling himself by a fierce effort. "Don't answer me now," he said. "Let me speak to you again later."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final"

A whirl of what seemed almost rage shook him; with a single stride he reached her and seized both her hands. "Is there—another man?" There was what startled her now in the harsh, hard voice.

She stiffened. "Well," she said, "—and if there is?"

At the chill quiet of her voice all the vicious strength and intolerance of the man blazed out. "You are right!" he said savagely. "It could make no difference to me! I will not take your answer—do you understand? In time you will give me a different one. I have waited for other things and I have had them in the end. I can wait for you!"

He released her hands—so violently that she fell back a step. Then, while she stood regarding him in shocked and indignant amaze, summoning all her forces to meet this fury that had both astonished and repelled her, his face swiftly changed. The flush of anger ebbed, the flash died in his eyes.

Once again his accustomed self, with the steady, confident eyes and swing of shoulder, he drew aside to let her pass and followed her along the box-bordered path to the piazza.

As they entered the blue-parlour, a lady very smart in black-and-white, and a sailor-hat whose girlish brim youthened her mature beauty, rose from her seat with Mrs. Allen and Nancy Langham, Echo's house-guest, a slight, glowing girl of nineteen, with eyes like marigolds in shade.

"Well, Echo," she said, "I thought you never would appear. I just ran in to remind you that you and Nancy promised to come to my dinner to-night at the 'Farm.' I've asked some of the youngsters out for a little dance afterward." She smiled a brilliant recognition to the heavy figure behind her.

"Mr. Craig!" she exclaimed. "So you are in town! How nice it would be of you to come too. Or do you find country-club gaieties too stale and unprofitable?"

He bowed over her hand. "My dear Mrs. Spottiswoode!" he said. "This is my lucky day! I shall be more than delighted!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE THRUST

The "Farm," as the Country-Club was popularly known to its habitués, was a long, three-storied structure of red brick on the selvedge of the southern suburb, set in a grove of maple trees facing a lake whose still depths were stirred by budding water-lilies, like the breasts of young girls. With its golf-links, and tennis-courts and its ball-room which formed an L at one side, its white, balustraded verandahs, it was the favoured resort of both the frivolous and athletic; its monthly dances were the gayest of the season's informal functions and on Saturday evenings its row of little dining-rooms, that looked out on a gentle slope of shrubbery and gravelled walks pricked out with paper lanterns, were favourite resorts for small dinner-parties.

Mrs. Spottiswoode's dinners were apt to have a pleasurable sprinkling of youth and sobriety and to-night the dozen of the younger set found sufficient foil in the fashionable rector of St. Andrews in clerical dress relieved only by the tiny amethyst cross that swung upon his waistcoat—in Senator Peyton, party-whip at Washington and one of the state's distinguished citizens, with piercing sword-grey eyes under brows as black as midnight—and finally in Cameron Craig.

As Echo Allen had said to her father, the latter was not "one of them." The phrase to her had been an instinctive expression of that subtle sense of caste that had been born in her, springing from long lines of gentle ancestors that linked back beyond the days of the Old Dominion. But the distinction lay deep in the mental formula of the man: it was not to be perceived in externals. To-night, in his faultless evening-dress, with his keen, strong face and assured manner, he had an air even of distinction that well became him, and the instant's painful embarrassment that Echo felt as her hand touched his in their first greeting yielded quickly to an unwilling admiration of his poise and control. If that flare of passion in the garden had left its traces, they had been successfully covered. He was once more the Cameron Craig she had known—till yesterday.

But beneath that unruffled exterior Craig's every pulse was in tumult. At table he found himself opposite Echo. The decorations were red roses and in a ruby gown with a single rose in the coil of her tawny hair, she seemed to him an inherent part of the scheme, a ruby pendent to the rich, shimmering setting. There had been many women to whom he had been passingly attracted—his tastes had been catholic enough in that regard! But he had never seen one whom he had wished to marry. He had spoken truly when he said that the women he had known had really meant nothing to him. His licenses had been but incidents after all. They had not ministered to the mental side of his nature, whereas this passion had taken swift and complete possession. As he saw her now, her cheeks flushing to the glow of the candles and her eyes like softly lighted sapphires, he felt open wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with distempered imaginings. There was another man! She had not denied it. And with the thought there grew in him a slow, cold hatred and determination.

Yet his face, as Echo glanced across the roses, betrayed no sign of disquiet. He was apparently listening amusedly to the small-talk of his partner, Nancy Langham, in a gown of pale gauze that made her look like a small, eager tiger-lily caught in a hampering cloud. In the interstices of conversation Echo could catch whiffs of her laughing nonsense:

"Isn't Dr. Custis quite wickedly handsome for a rector! I've been instructed not to ask him if he is related to Martha Washington. The man across from Mrs. Spottiswoode is Richard Brent, he is 'The Herald,' and a power in the community, I believe. Our hostess is wearing the new wave; it costs a lot, but they say it's guaranteed to last six months. And to think," she sighed, "that Melissa, my maid, spends a dollar a week trying to have her wool ironed straight! The man with the goatee, who looks so Spanishy, is Mr. Horace Leighton, the New York artist who is doing the mural paintings for the new City Hall here."

"So there isn't any one here who isn't anybody!" Craig observed.

"Only me," she said. "The reason I'm asked is because I'm frivolous. I'm supposed to offset the feast of reason with bubbles and froth."

"At any rate," remarked the senator, "seriousness is not to fall in arrears. Down at the other end they have actually got to politics."

Echo's glance followed his. Their hostess was holding a glass of wine between her eye and the candle-light, which splashed a bright crimson ray on her pretty face. It was the rector who was speaking:

"As for myself, I'm afraid I'm a friend to all the old, hackneyed arguments. 'If meat maketh my brother to offend,' you know." He pointed to his wine-glass, which, with the arrival of the soup, he had turned upside-down. "You see I am consistent."

"Politics?" queried Echo. "It seems to be only teetotalism."

"Ah," the senator answered, "but it's coming to be the same thing nowadays."

"One understands the individual objection on moral grounds," said Mrs. Spottiswoode. "That's a matter of personal belief and conscience. And the Church must be above criticism—must take the sterner course. But for those of us who don't think it wrong, the other arguments seem so—so local. I suppose drinking does keep the negroes from doing as much work as they might, but it's hard on the rest of us to have to cut our cloth by the farmer's pattern! We here, for example, at this table, are to go without our sauterne because he has trouble in getting in his tobacco."

"Exactly," agreed the churchman. "The greatest good of the greatest number. And isn't that true democracy, after all? But of course the agricultural problem is the least of it—there are the figures of poverty and crime. The two are twin-brothers, of course. And drink is the father of them both. Will, character, determination—a man with these may overcome the habit. But these are just the qualities that men in the mass lack. When a weak man falls our system keeps him down. I once heard Thomas Malcolm—every one here knows of him and his work, I presume—say that for the average drunkard to reform with a saloon on every corner is about as easy as to hoist one's-self out of hell by one's boot-straps. I'm inclined to think he is right. And I never saw a drunkard yet—a real Simon-pure drunkard, I mean; not a mere sophomoric tippler—who wouldn't jump at the chance to reform if he could. But he has no more chance of winning out now than a gambler against loaded dice." He paused, with a little gesture. "But then," he added, "the modern political movement for prohibition has made every one familiar with the basic arguments."

Treadwell, spruce young corporation attorney and cotillon leader, looked up interestedly from the other end of the table; the hostess's fan had begun to flutter—a sign of agitation. For Cameron Craig's affiliations with the great Trust were well-known, though presumably not to the clergyman, who had met him for the first time that evening. Craig, however, seemed quite unconscious of personal implications.

"Do you seriously think, sir," he asked, with the faintest trace of irony, "that the statistics of crime would be materially lowered in your state if it went 'dry' next year?"

"I do," replied the rector with emphasis. "And not only lowered. They would be practically wiped out. There wouldn't be enough left to constitute an item in the appropriation for public printing."

"Naturally, however," Craig observed, "as the state has always been 'wet,' exact data is lacking to assist one's speculations."

"On the contrary," said the other. "Every jail furnishes them. I think," he went on, turning now to Treadwell, "that it is the experience of every criminal lawyer that liquor, in some phase or other, has been back of the larger proportion of cases he is called on to defend."

The young man nodded. "I never had any experience in criminal cases," he said, "but I should think you were not far wrong. What do you say, Brent?"

"I agree with you," the journalist answered, "but my view of course is a superficial one. It is a pity that Harry Sevier isn't here; we should have got a valuable opinion."

"You may be gratified then," said the hostess. "Though Mr. Sevier couldn't come to dinner, he will be here for the dancing."

The senator spoke. "Sevier! I heard him in court yesterday."

"So did I," commented Nancy, aside. "I gave up an auction-bridge for it, and I wish I hadn't. It wasn't exciting at all."

Mrs. Spottiswoode looked relief—at last the talk had shifted to safe ground. "He lost the case, I hear," she said. "I wonder what was the matter. Wasn't he in good form?"

The senator looked thoughtful. "In one way, yes," he replied judicially. "I confess, though, I had rather expected something different, but just what I scarcely know."

Nancy turned her small, piquant face. "I know. We all expected Mr. Sevier to do what he has done so often—but didn't to-day. Oh," she exclaimed almost angrily, "while he was talking along, like a machine, I could have shaken him!"

"That would have furnished the sensation!" said Treadwell. "And I should think it might have had its effect on the jury, too. Juries can be intimidated. I wish you had tried it."

She made a little face at him across the nodding roses, then turned more earnestly to her partner. "I don't know anything about court matters or criminal trials, but from where I sat I could see the man he was defending. He looked so hopeless and—scared! I wanted to stand up and scream across the room: Can't you see? Look at the poor thing there! Make the jury feel! You were thinking the same thing too, Echo, I could see it in your face."

Echo lifted her eyes. In the candle-light her cheek held a rising flush. She looked across at the rector. "What do you think, Dr. Custis?" she asked, evenly.

He responded promptly. "Perhaps the explanation isn't so far afield. I presume the man had confessed to him and Sevier knew he was guilty."

Echo was conscious of a wave of relief at an explanation so simple and credible. It had never occurred to her to question the accuracy of other verdicts Harry had won in the past. Each had seemed to her the triumph of a just cause over a baleful combination of circumstance, the brilliant freeing of truth and innocence from entangling error and maleficent scheming. But if this man was guilty and Harry had known it beyond question, what other outcome had been possible? At the moment she saw in that even, cold presentation of the court-room only the conscientious determination of the lawyer, who, as the law prescribed, stood by his client to demand that justice, if she must exact her penalty, prove conclusively every jot and tittle of her ground.

Craig's eyes had been regarding her steadily. With the spreading of that flush upon her cheeks a covert, laughing allusion that had come to his ear on the court-house steps on the day of the trial darted to his mind. A cool, keen certainty rushed through him. Sevier! Fool that he was not to have thought of him before! This young flâneur—and drunkard!—this petty trifler with his profession! Was that white indignation of the garden, this vivid flush, for him? He leaned forward, his heavy voice, intense and well modulated, addressed the clergyman:

"An interesting hypothesis, but the implication seems hardly safe. A lawyer's responsibility to his client is a very grave one. He owes none toward the commonwealth—the state's attorney takes care of that. Any less conventional view should appeal to a lawyer, I think, as dangerous and uncalled-for."

"What do you fancy was responsible for Sevier's method of defence in this case?" asked the rector.

There was an instant of blank silence. The conversation had absorbed the lesser talk and other voices were hushed. Craig's look was set upon the long oval damask with its glistening silver and baskets of brilliant fruit, its leaf thin glasses with languid beads rising in their liquid amber, its knots of fern and bonbons. His big fingers were twisting the stem of a goblet. When he spoke it was as though he had not heard the question.

"I attended a trial once," he said, "at a frontier town in the far southwest, a border community where procedure is very primitive. The man was charged with murder. He was a school-master, I believe, and in a quarrel with some local bully or other, had killed him. I was in the place on some land-business and went to the trial for mere amusement. The whole neighbourhood was there. Both men, it appeared, had been in their cups, and self-defence seemed an adequate plea. Acquittal was regarded as fairly certain—the more so as the District Attorney was the bosom-friend of the accused man, and everybody knew it. There was almost no attempt at evidence, which didn't seem surprising under the circumstances, and the state made the baldest farce of its cross-examination. The real interest came after a rather long recess that preceded the final speeches. The prisoner's counsel was a young man with a rough, direct address that caught the people. He had them pretty well with him, too, and when he sat down there seemed very little reason why the jury should even leave the box. The speech had been a fairly long one and as it had grown dark, candles had been brought in and set about—two on the judge's desk and some on the tables."

Echo repressed a start. It had come to her suddenly that there was a significance in what he was saying—a suggestion that a quick clairvoyant sense told her was principally for her. In the few words he had, with apparent unintention, sketched the actual scene in the court-room of the day before, and while reversing its elements, was picturing, in unfamiliar guise, its identical situation. She felt her face slowly harden, and turned her profile toward him, her hand playing with a spray of fern beside her plate.

"During the whole speech the District Attorney had sat in his chair, with his chin in his collar and his eyes closed, never moving. When his turn came he didn't rise; in fact, it was clear that he had been asleep. A laugh went round and the sheriff put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. He got up, looking confused, and while he blinked at the candles, some one in the audience called out, 'Never mind, old man. If you can't make a speech, recite a poem.' It was curious, but the remark seemed to give him a clue, and he began to recite Hood's Eugene Aram."

Craig paused a moment and sipped from his wine-glass. All at the table were leaning forward intently. Treadwell was frowning at his plate. No one spoke; only a fork, dropped from Nancy Langham's fingers, rattled against the cloth.

"It was a strange sight," went on Craig, "and one I have always remembered. You must picture the crowded court-room, the gloom, the flaring candles, and the whole uncanny episode, to realise the effect that was produced. The man was by nature a marvellous actor—he would have made his fortune on any stage. At first it seemed as if he didn't know quite where he was, but then the ballad itself gripped him and he rendered it, acting each line, as I never heard it before or since. I had never realised what was in that poem. Very few there, I suppose, had ever heard it in their lives, and they listened in a fascinated silence while he rolled it out to the last line.

"'Two hard-faced men set out from Lynn,
Through the rain and heavy mist,
And Eugene Aram walked between
With gyves upon his wrist.'"

He paused again. "Oh, finish!" gasped Nancy Langham. "I don't like that story. What then?"

"When he ended he walked out of the court-room without waiting for the verdict."

Echo's head turned toward him. "They found him guilty!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswode.

"Yes."

"And you say the District Attorney was his best friend?" asked the artist.

"So I was told."

"And yet wanted to convict him?"

Craig shook his head. "No, I didn't say that."

"Then what," inquired the rector, "do you take it, inspired him to such an extraordinary action?"

"Oh," said Craig, and as he spoke, for the first time he looked full at Echo. "It all came out afterward. He didn't realise what he was doing. He was drunk."

For an instant Echo's breath stopped. In the unexpected dénouement she had guessed, as at a lightning-flash, Craig's real purpose. Sharply, baldly introduced, the tale stood forth intrusive and malicious, an implied slur upon a man who was not present to refute it. Her whole being flooded with fierce resentment, mingled with an angry amaze that of all there no one else seemed to have caught the insinuation. To the rest it had been at most a gaucherie, a parallel which, if perhaps not felicitous, had been without significance and would be readily forgotten. Therein lay the added sting, that Craig had so accurately judged the outcome. He had guessed how it stood with her and Harry Sevier, and counting on her keener sensitiveness where the latter was concerned, had barbed his shaft for her alone!

The next instant, however, the tension broke with every one talking at once. From this babble the senator emerged with a negro story about a trial with "exterminatin' circumstances," which brought a ripple of laughter, and presently the hostess gave the rising signal.

The room opened upon the ball-room from whose further end already came the squeak of tuned catgut, and beyond this spread the invitingly cool verandas, now beginning to fill with filmy gowns that showed pallidly against the evening dusk, where the bouquet of masculine segars mingled with the dewed scent of shrubbery. Here in the increasing numbers, unobserved as she thought, Echo stepped down onto the cool dark turf and following one of the little meandering bush-bordered paths, came to a rustic bench over which a paper lantern threw flickering rose-coloured shadows. On this she sat down, struggling to regain her lost composure and grateful for the sense of quiet and the cool inspiration of the water, over whose margin the moonbeams danced in elfish ecstasy.

In another moment, however, the silence was broken. A step sounded on the path, and she looked up to see Craig standing before her.

CHAPTER IX

THE TURN OF THE LONG LANE

Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire. In her resentment it had seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that slur upon the man she loved, and she had been aching fiercely to repel it.

Craig tossed his segar away. He made no apologies for having followed her from the piazza. "May I sit here and talk to you?" he asked.

She remained standing. "Mr. Craig," she said with quiet emphasis, "I am glad you have come to me here. I have something to ask you which I could not have asked you—there."

He bowed and stood waiting.

"I fancied," she went on, "in certain of your remarks at the table a lurking innuendo. It is difficult to reply to such a thing. You would make it possible if you would put it in a more direct form."

"Your own observation does not appear to err in directness," he answered, after a pause. "I am afraid I must ask you to descend to plain English."

"In the course of the dinner you told a story."

"Henceforth I shall congratulate myself on my skill as a raconteur." His tone was mildly ironic.

"It seemed to me—and I think I am of average intelligence and not more fanciful than most—that by that story you intended to convey, an insinuation against the reputation of a gentleman whom I do not care to hear maligned."

He looked at her with smouldering eyes. He was feeling admiration for her quick, hot southern blood and resentful spirit. It was part of that splendid type of womanhood that he had determined to make his own. And that it was now displayed in defence of the man whose weakness he despised and whose personality he hated filled him with a dull, glooming fury. His lips twisted. "Maligned?" he repeated, in an accent that was a question.

"That was my word," she said steadily.

"You appear to attach an extraordinary importance to my tale," he retorted, with grim sarcasm.

"Do you deny that there was innuendo?"

He smiled. "I can endure even that suspicion, since it is such a compliment to my own subtlety. May I ask, in my turn, in whose interest you so valorously take up the cudgels?"

"Your story directly followed a reference to Mr. Henry Sevier's handling of a case in court here. The unexpected outcome of the trial in your tale was due to the fact that its chief character, though no one realised it, was under the influence of liquor. The implication seemed obvious—that Mr. Sevier was not himself when he conducted his defence."

He shrugged his shoulders. "You are the only one who has drawn such a conclusion?"

Her pale face blazed. "Oh, I understand! You intended the inference for me alone!"

"Well?" he asked, with aggravating calmness.

"Did you insinuate that, or did you not?" Her pent-up anger was tearing now at her self-control.

He laughed, a short, jarring laugh. He felt an insane desire to seize that slender, unyielding body in his great arms, to rain kisses on that vivid, scornful mouth with its short upper lip, and bend or break her like a sapling to his savage will. "Suppose I did," he said stonily. "What then?"

"That was a contemptible act!" The young voice cut like a whip-lash and involuntarily Craig's big fists clenched. "And if I were Mr. Sevier, I would horsewhip you!"

A sound from behind them fell across the surcharged quiet. Both turned astonished faces—Echo's quivering with feeling, Craig's set and stormy—upon the man whose name had just been spoken. Neither had heard his step as he came quickly along the grassy path, nor had Sevier guessed the situation till those pregnant sentences sent the blood from his heart. He had thought the secret of his failure unsuspected. The realisation now that one, at least, had guessed the truth had been instantly swallowed up in the bitter knowledge that it had fallen to her—the one woman in the world—to defend him, who was undeserving!

Craig regarded him with a veiled smile that was half a sneer. The apparition had come at a fateful moment. Then his glance passed to Echo. "May I ask," he said, "whether you have yet cross-examined Mr. Sevier?"

He bowed and went quickly up the path toward the lighted piazzas.

There ensued a silence in which two minds travelled far. Echo had sat down upon the bench, her face averted. Her anger had faded out and her heart was hammering at the thought that Harry had heard, in her defence of him, what was in truth a confession. Across the aching interval broke the wanton bubble of a whip-poor-will.

"Echo—" he said in a muffled voice.

She looked up at him in the feathery light. "You heard—I wish you hadn't. Yet I couldn't help it! That ridiculous slur! But you can't possibly imagine that—that any one who knows you—"

He stopped her with an abrupt gesture. "Wait. I want to—I must tell you something."

"No, no!" she protested. "You shall not! I need no assurance. Do you think that I—"

He shook his head. But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt for the whisper of malice. But the look and sneer had flicked him on the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him. In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome there could be no evasion between them. There must be the truth. He was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no malingerer.

"Thank you," he said, "for that! Yet what Craig wished you to believe—was quite true."

She stared at him unbelievingly. "True!" Her lips formed rather than spoke the word.

"Yes. I was under the influence of liquor. But for that I should have won the case, I believe."

"But," she faltered, "I don't—understand. Why, I never saw you in—that condition in my life! I was there. I—I heard you speak."

"It is not the first time," he said steadily. "Nor the second, nor the third. Liquor helped me to win my cases. I thought I had made it my slave when it had made itself my master. This time it failed me. And I—I failed my client," he added bitterly.

She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice. Her own hurt was too keen. She only heard the high-built structures of her own ideals crumbling down about her feet. "So Craig was right!" she said under her breath.

"Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on. "It is because I must. All my life I have cared very little what others thought. But—you—I care what you think. I never knew how much till now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!" He bent and took her hands. "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"

Her lingers trembled in his grasp. Pictures were flashing before her mind—frost-stung October days when they had galloped with the baying hounds, over the blown, tinted leaves and russet fields—winter skating-parties on the frozen river, summer dances like that of to-night, for which the music was now swinging a hundred yards away—always it had been she and Harry Sevier. He had been so superior to the blandishments of the smaller vices. Others had failed and fallen; only he had remained on his pedestal, a type of brilliant accomplishment. She saw now his success as unenduring, fictitious, his talents besmirched with the vice that was most hateful to her. "Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third!" In their own circle she had seen the dreadful cycle more than once repeated—the slow, baleful fastening of habit, the struggle, the piteous, ignoble yielding and the final slipping down to degraded depths from which there could be no resurrection. There was Chilly, her own twin-brother, with his feet set on the same primrose path. And now was it to be Harry Sevier? She shuddered and drew her hand from his clasp.

"I—see," he said, in a slow, even voice. "You can't trust me." It was not the Sevier that had kissed her hand who spoke now, but one whom that gesture seemed to have flung an infinite distance from her.

"Can you trust yourself?" she asked.

Harry's tongue touched his lips—as it had done in his inner office on the day of the trial, when he stood looking at her picture on his desk. Since that day he had known no breath of the periodic craving. But now, curiously, he felt his mouth growing all at once arid and dry with the old slinking thirst. Could he trust himself? The question seemed to thrust itself at him with a malevolent significance. How much of his will had he indeed, surrendered? Did he know?

There rose up suddenly in him a savage resolution. Not another drop upon his lips—never, never! Not for the sake of success, not for his very life, never so long as he lived!

He took her hands in both his own, leaned down and kissed them. Then, without a word he went rapidly from her.

CHAPTER X

AFTER A YEAR

Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy thoroughfare beneath. Outside was the spring sunshine and the smell of growing trees. Just across from the building stood the city's new Opera House, over whose ambitious entrance was still stretched a canvas sign advertising a mass-meeting held the evening before under the auspices of the Civic Club.

He read the lettering reflectively as he blew out clouds of the fragrant, opalescent incense: "Protest Against Machine-Rule." He smiled. The old revolt of the Quixotic handful against the entrenched forces that had governed the city for a generation—one more of the popular ebullitions which punctuate modern progress, the familiar periodic dust-storms from whose turmoil the Old Guard emerged, moveless as ever in the saddle, to a new campaign dictated by the mighty Over-Lord, the great Public Services Corporation which, through its multiple ramifications, assumed to control the state's franchises, to dictate its significant legislation—even to influence its judiciary. As he read the words on the canvas bellying in the breeze, his smile was cynical.

Yet the smile had a touch of wistfulness too. The movement had grown out of the general unrest, the keener public conscience, that had accompanied the political renaissance that in the past year had been sweeping over a dozen commonwealths. In the old southern city, wherein principles were not yet become mere hypocrisies and folk still preserved old-fashioned political ideals, it had attained to the prestige of well-known names and engaging personalities. Their forefathers had been men to whom honour and cleanliness in public life had meant all things and who had governed as naturally as they had breathed. And there were many among these to whom the new era, with its open sneer at public trust and its subservience to great aggregations of wealth selfishly employed, had become an increasing reproach. The man who gazed down from the office window had long ago made his choice. He had no illusions. He knew to what allegiance he owed his present position. It had been the reward of long and faithful service! Yet sometimes still the bonds chafed—sometimes still the new spirit that was stirring abroad struck through his ingrained habit, calling to him to do the impossibly fanatical thing!

There was a knock at the door and a man entered. It was Cameron Craig. He responded briefly to the lawyer's greeting and coming to the window, stood a moment beside him, looking down at the hurrying wheeled traffic, the loitering pavement pedestrians—and the flapping canvas sign. He laughed a little, but without mirth.

"You were there, I suppose," he said.

Treadwell nodded. "Yes. It's tilting at the windmills, of course."

"They began too late," said Craig grimly. "The ticket is safe enough this year. But next year—the Gubernatorial campaign—if they only had fire enough to keep the blaze going till then, they might give us trouble."

The other did not answer. His eyes had rested briefly on Craig's face, then again had sought the window. He was thinking that his visitor had not changed for the better during the past two months. The fact, indeed, would have been apparent to a casual eye. The virulent force and will were no less noticeable, but there was now a kind of glaze over his face—a certain fierce and sullen quality that seemed a reflection of inner bitterness.

The judicial eye clove to the fact. Since that far-away night at the "Farm," Craig's passion had never loosened its grip. It was characteristic of the man that he had on that occasion played the only card in his hand, not blindly, but by instinct and without hesitation. But while he had apparently gained his point, it had been borne to him gradually that his very method of play had lost him infinitely more than he had gained. In the mind of the woman he desired he had transgressed the rules of the game, and the realisation maddened him. Never since then had he heard her name coupled with Harry Sevier's. Never had he seen them together. This had given him satisfaction. But if he had shattered her regard for the man whom he now hated more tenaciously than he had ever hated anything in his whole life, the fact had seemed to hold no advantage for himself. On several visits to the city, he had invented reasons to call at the Allen house, but he had soon learned that he was not to meet Echo there. He had, however, seen her elsewhere more than once—when her gaze had gone by him as if he had been empty air. Though his veins burned with the fever of the famished, he had not ventured to challenge that cold aloofness. But it had rankled and stung him almost beyond endurance, till he had come to thirst avidly for some kind of test between them—for action, whatever the result might mean. And the fierce desire that raged within him, feeding on itself, had left its sinister traces on his face.

Abruptly Craig withdrew his gaze. "I see young Sevier held forth last night. The last time I heard him was in court, just a year ago. The young fop! He'd do better to stick to his lawbooks—though I hear he has no cases anymore."

"It's his own choice," the attorney answered coldly. He liked Harry Sevier and he resented the other's tone, no less than the words. "He could have a new client every day if he wanted. As a matter of fact he hasn't taken a case since the one you speak of. He fought for six months trying to get through an appeal on that. It was the first criminal case he had ever lost and it cut him up some, I fancy. Of course it's ridiculous to take it so to heart, but I swear I can't help liking him for it! He's not merely a fop, either. In my opinion he comes mighty near being just what that crowd at the Civic Club have been looking for."

Craig's eyes had not left Treadwell's. "In what way?" he asked.

"As a spokesman. They know what they believe and what they want to fight for. But they've been inarticulate. Most of them are blue-blooded old fogies, with their souls full of fine ideals, but with no leader. In him (and in that speech of his last night he threw in his lot with them absolutely) they have a finely trained legal mind—for with all his old fire-works Sevier always had that—and a natural orator besides. You should have heard him last night! For two hours he held that great audience in a perfect spell. 'The finest exhibition of southern oratory since the war' the papers called it this morning, and I tell you, Craig, they weren't far wrong!"

He stopped, somewhat embarrassed by his own enthusiasm, and wondering at the dark look on the other's face. Perhaps to hide this, Craig turned away. His fingers were twitching and for an instant he was not wholly master of himself. When he spoke, however, he had regained his governance.

"After all, it wasn't the future of this anti-machine campaign that I came to talk about. There's something nearer home that is worrying me."

"What's the trouble?"

"The Welles-Scott case decision. It is to be handed down on the first of May. It must be in our favour."

The other looked surprised. "But surely it will be."

"It's not on the cards. I thought I knew the Judge, but there are signs that I'm afraid of."

The attorney sniffed incredulously. "Judge Allen!" he exclaimed. "Why, the trust made him. And it keeps him made, I should think, too."

Craig shook his head. "He's been talking lately. We've had warnings from some who are very close to him. This decision must be what we want it to be. Voters are thinking more than they used to. If these Civic Club people keep up the agitation—particularly if they link on to the prohibition movement, as they are likely to do—the distillery may become a live issue in the next state campaign. That's the great danger. And this Welles-Scott case strikes at the heart of the matter. If the Trust loses this decision it will be the signal for a crop of bills in the next legislature that will cost us a cool million to fight. And they may lead anywhere. I tell you we have to have it!"

The other mused a moment. "The Judge, of course, can't be reached in—in ordinary ways."

"Of course not. He's not venal. We've been able to depend on him so long because he has grown up with the Trust—he was its counsel for many years—and its interests were his. He thought with it. His mind ran in the same groove. But Beverly Allen, the Trust's counsel, and Judge Allen of the Supreme Court are different propositions. I always thought this test case was a mistake! But I was overruled. Well, we've got to have the decision. If one way won't bring it about, another shall. Something will have to—persuade him. He must have a weak spot. We must find it, that's all."

"His life's been an open book, if that's what you mean," said the attorney, slowly.

"Few men's life are open books," returned Craig, with cynical shortness. "There's apt to be a page pasted down somewhere. That part of it is your business. If there's any such page in his case, you find it! I don't care how small a page it is, or how long ago it was pasted down. If it's there I want it!"

"His record was combed with a fine-tooth comb when he went on the bench," said Treadwell. "The Trust wanted a man that the opposition couldn't get anything on. That was before your time, of course. I went over the report myself. There wasn't anything there—nothing but the vaguest suspicion of an old love affair that was polished off twenty years ago."

Craig turned sharply. "A love affair! After his marriage?"

"Why yes, I think so. But there weren't any details. And the woman died abroad long ago."

"What was her name?"

Treadwell looked at him curiously. A faint flush had crept over his face. "See here, Craig," he said, "after all, there's a limit to decency. At the most it was nothing but a passing infatuation—an innocent one. There was not the faintest breath of scandal. And as I told you, the woman is dead."

Craig's eyes were boring into him. "Treadwell," he said in a hard voice, "you don't seem to understand. This is a big game, and there is no limit! None! And I intend to win it! What was her name?"

The other leaned to knock the ash from his segar. There was a tense pause before he replied. "I have forgotten."

"Where are the old reports?"

"They were destroyed."

Craig looked at him an instant, his eyes like sparkling points of steel. He opened his lips to speak, but he did not. Instead, with a shrug of incredulous contempt, he caught up his hat, turned to the door, opened it and went out.

Treadwell listened to the heavy footsteps descending the stair. Then he went and shut the door.

"The hound!" he said under his breath.

CHAPTER XI

CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON

From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked steadily at the Judge from under his bushy eyebrows, as the latter said:

"Yes, it is true that I was for years affiliated with the interests you represent. I was their attorney. The connection ceased when I, myself, severed it, eleven years ago."

Craig's lips, that had been set in a hard line, parted in a satiric smile. He was leading doggedly up to what he purposed to say. "To its profound loss," he said from the shadow. "You had cogent reasons, no doubt."

The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted. "I'll tell you, if you like," he said at length. "But you will understand that I challenge no one else's convictions. I assume to sit in judgment only upon my own."

Craig nodded. "Of course."

"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was young then too. Communities did not take it too seriously—particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me—to the men I knew—the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up—a kind of moral seven-year locust—at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men' right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my class. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new element in politics and in every-day life—the sentiment against liquor—was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was changing, and I knew—long before I admitted it to myself—that I was a part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at last there came a day when I—changed too."

His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling. He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:

"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home—drunk. I had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears—in my own son!"

He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he spoke again his voice was more even:

"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I—saw. Could anything else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the community. They were making a drunkard of Chilly! The Trust furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid tool—a part of its brain in this state—had guarded it from error, shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father! That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I slept."

There was a slight pause. Craig's lowering look had been watching the other curiously. The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no chord of response in him. Rather it roused contempt—not for the son, whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently in his own mind. To him no man's motives were pure. The man before him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature. Had not the Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat? Was he fool enough to think that he—Craig—was not aware of that? It had expected him to pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had. And did the other think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism—to evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple? Craig spoke:

"And—the Corporation. What did it say? Eh?"

"The president of the board came to see me. He was good enough to ask me to reconsider. But I had made my choice."

Craig leaned forward, his arm on the little inlaid desk beside him. "Let me finish," he said with deliberate meaning. "The board, accepting that decision with the keenest regret, desired to make your retirement the occasion for showing in a tangible way its appreciation of your long and faithful service. A seat on the Supreme Bench being vacant, the Directorate proposed, unless your taste pointed otherwise, to use such influence as it might possess, to gain for your name the consideration in that connection which it deserved."

A look of surprise had crossed the Judge's face as he began. A sensitive flush swept it as he ended. "If you imply that my seat was offered me, Mr. Craig, even tentatively, at that time, or in that connection, you are in error!"

Craig's sneer was open now. There was no more pretence. "If not in so many words, in effect! Pshaw! Do you mean to pretend you would have had that appointment if the Trust hadn't backed you for it? It owned the state bag and baggage then, as it does now—and as it will continue to do! It put you on the Bench and it has kept you there, and you know it!"

The Judge was on his feet now, his flush faded to pallor. He deigned no answer to the flung assertion. "What is your object in coming to me to say this?" His voice was deep and resonant.

"Just this!" Craig lifted his arm, his big fist clenched, his eyes narrowed. "You were the Trust's counsel and confident for twenty years—till it put you where you are now! Do you think it did that for nothing? It made you, Beverly Allen! And now it has reason to believe that you intend to knife it in the back—to drag the ermine it put on your shoulders into an incendiary hue-and-cry started by demagogues who aim to destroy a great industry!"

"What do you mean, sir?" The Judge's tone was icy.

"I mean the Welles-Scott decision!" Craig said in a low, deadly voice. "That"—his clenched hand smote the light desk at his elbow with a savage blow—"must be ours!"

For an instant there was blank silence. The Judge stood aghast, his very speech frozen with indignation. To him his judicial calling had an element that was almost sacred. This man—to whom he had given the hand of friendship, who had the entrée into the exclusive circles of southern gentility—this man assumed to lay coarse fingers upon his vestment of office, to question his integrity as a Judge! He dared to believe him, Beverly Allen, cheaply venal—a puppet, whose legal rulings were at the beck and call of corporate influence! The room seemed suddenly stifling hot. He turned to the window, flung the curtains wide and drew a gulping breath of the fresh air.

He had not seen Craig's sudden start. For at the smashing blow of his fist on the fragile Italian desk, a curious thing had happened. Its catch loosened by the jar, a tiny carven panel had fallen with a little click, and a thin sheaf of yellowed letters had dropped and spread fan-wise beside his hand. The backs of the envelopes were uppermost, and across the top one was written in a dim, twirly hand and faded ink, the initials B.A.

A thought darted like cold lightning through Craig's brain. "B.A."—Beverly Allen! Whose were those old letters? The initials were in a woman's hand. What if they held a clue to the old story Treadwell, his attorney, had spoken of? A quick instinct inspired him. His hand closed over them quickly—went to his breast—as the Judge turned from the window.

The latter had regained self-control. He stood erect and tall, his leonine head thrown back, his eyes shining, and in his face a look the other had never seen in it before. "You have presumed," he said, "to say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your corporation would dare to say. And you have taken advantage of my hospitality to say it in my own house. I choose now to believe this message an individual one, springing from a personal and base initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once served. 'Once,' I say. For I serve it no longer. I am now a member of the Judiciary of this commonwealth. Because the corporation furthered my candidacy, you assume that it 'made' me. Perhaps it did. But it never owned my conscience or my integrity! Nor does it now, thank God!"

As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell. "Nelson," he said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."

Craig had risen to his feet. He looked at the other an instant with livid face. Then he went rapidly to the hall and snatched up his hat and stick. The outer door closed heavily behind him.

In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters. Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from their worn envelopes and spread them open before him. A look of chagrin crossed his face. No woman had written them; they had been penned by the Judge himself—he was familiar with the heavy, characteristic hand-writing. Were they, then, only some old letters to his wife, perhaps? He was holding one leaf to the light. Suddenly his eye caught. He made an exclamation. His face lighted with amaze and savage exultation.

What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the very face of the man for whom he had craved it! For on that leaf, etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into the daylight the corpse of an ignoble passion, cast scorn upon the writer's name and blight and wither present and future! How little, after all, the tricks of the body changed! Twenty years—and yet, his letter!

What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion? He, the jurist of spotless living and good repute—to be shown forth to the world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the scrap-heap in a disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!" The woman presumably had scorned his offer—since she had sent him back his letters—and yet on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white! What incredible folly had led him to preserve it? Twenty years ago—in the dead past—and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, damning and beyond denial!

He laughed aloud. It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand! If he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would strike her too. She thought herself above him, did she? What if this story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners? Would she hold herself so high then? Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring her to his level! He felt no prick of shame at the base move he contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring. Ambition in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as unyielding as steel.

He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket. In another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next state.

CHAPTER XII

A HOSTAGE TO THE BOTTLE

The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which had been wont on past occasions to gather at the old court-house when he spoke, another revelation of Harry Sevier. It had been impromptu—not the outgrowth of deliberate plan. The non-appearance of a much-heralded speaker had thrust the exigency upon him without warning, and he had acquiesced only in a keen desire to save from blank failure a meeting in whose principles and object he was by his very character deeply interested. The tortuous involutions of local politics had never interested him, but he had thrilled to the stirring beneath the surface of the great forces of good and evil and the present agitation for clean government had found him enrolled, without question, on its side.

As he stepped forward to face the great curtain of faces that stretched outward and upward beyond the footlights, he had not known what he should say. Indeed, while he slowly "felt" his audience in his opening sentences, the sub-conscious part of his mind had been full of a matter foreign to the subject at hand. There had come to him a fleeting recollection of the last time he had spoken in public—the day upon which he had betrayed his client and put a man, of whose innocence an instinct deeper-rooted than reason had convinced him, into the striped habiliments of the convict. The sharp, aching compunction of that thought had never left him. Since that day, though he went daily to his sumptuous office, he had taken no new case. He had gone always with that sin clanking against his conscience and the memory of the trial had focused always in that glimpse, across the mass of faces, of a woman's look of puzzle and hurt. During the months since then that face had hung before his fevered vision as a far, cool oasis to the desert wayfarer. These had been black months of fierce, untiring battle with the appetite to which he had surrendered himself, and which he had sworn to conquer. There had been times when the avid thirst had seized him by the throat, when endurance had almost failed: days when he had sat in his inner office, with door locked and blinds down, fighting desperately with the strenuous impulse that seemed to be dragging him bodily, as if with fleshly hands, to the little wall-cabinet whose door had never been unlocked since the day of that sinister court-recess.

During this prolonged, grappling struggle he had never been to Midfields. He had seen Echo but occasionally, walking or driving on the street, or less frequently at functions from which he could not absent himself without remark. There had been no confidences between them. Never had he leaned to her to whisper: "You see! Do I do well?" Never had her lips said, "I know ... I know, and I am watching!" yet his heart had told him that she was alive to the issue, that she felt the forces conflicting for the mastery. She had not been in the audience on this day, but as the faces pulsed and receded till they wove into a grey blur in the misty blaze of the incandescents, Harry's inner vision had a swift memory of her face as it had looked in that old court-house scene.

And with it, as though it had been a key to the disused mental machinery, strangely and wonderfully there had come back to him, in a sudden flashing illumination like summer lightning, a surging return of the old power, the vivid rush of lambent images in his brain and the burning, insistent phrase to his tongue—the power that he had thought gone forever with that shuddering failure of a year before.

As he felt again the old native ability rising in him, strong and undismayed, and once more his own, without hostage given to the bottle, a stinging delight had swept through him. It was the fruit of victory, and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle. Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of self-shame. Never in those old days had he employed that talent for the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt defeating of the clear ends of justice! It was another Harry Sevier who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom principle was become a guiding star. The leashed power and restraint had been bred of that long struggle, and from the fresh mastery of self which he had so hardly gained, flowed forth a subtle magnetic quality that held his listeners mute. In the hush that wrapped the great assemblage the speaker of the day, late by an hour, had entered the back of the stage, to wave back the nonplussed chairman and to seat himself in the rear, enthralled by the white magic that swayed all alike. The speech had held no rodomontade, none of the pyrotechnics that, had lent a flavour of sensation to past court trials. It had been on a higher plane than appeal to superficial feeling or ingrained prejudice. It had brought no accusation, pointed no finger, save backward to old ideals of community respect, and forward to the wave of independent thought that was sweeping over sister states to break in thundering force upon the crags of misrule.

It had closed in a note of hope and of promise, and ended with the hall hushed in that greatest tribute to true oratory—absolute silence.

Next day, wherever men congregated in the little capital, Harry Sevier's name was on every lip. It was flung wide, too, in newspaper headlines until the ripple stirred far borders. Of this he himself could not be unaware. He knew that never in the old days had he spoken as he had spoken then. He was conscious also that in the trial of himself his faculties had been reorganised and renewed, had emerged sounder and truer from the strenuous testing, and that the fire through which he had passed had burned away the rubble and left metal that was more worthy. Nor could he fail to realise that at a single step he had attained to a new and unfamiliar status in the community. He felt this not so much in the multiple congratulations of the many, as in a certain new deference that he distinguished in more reserved greetings.

Beneath all, however, but one opinion profoundly concerned him—Echo's. As he swung along the street this afternoon, the thought of her excluded all others.

Rounding the corner, a voice came to him—a ribald, good-humoured voice, inviting some one to "come and have a drink." He turned abruptly. Chisholm Allen stood a little way from him, before a swing-door through which sifted the clink of glasses and boisterous conversation.

Chilly was decidedly the worse for wear. Much water had run under the bridges since he had tussled with old Nelson, the butler, over the decanter of sherry. His face was pallid and the marks of incorrigible weakness and self-indulgence showed clearly through its habitual good-nature. Chilly's feet were set in the paths of dalliance and he had ceased to care if anybody knew it. He greeted the newcomer, however, with a trace of embarrassment which he dissipated with a laugh, as he said:

"The invitation's for you, if you like, Harry. We'll have one to the silver-tongued orator! What do you say?"

For answer Harry linked an arm in his and turned him down the street—away from the swing-door. "Come up to my rooms, Chilly, it's cool there and we haven't had a talk for a blue moon. No, we'll consider the drink afterward."

Just at the moment a carriage and pair bowled by them. It was drawn by the Allens' bays and Echo was on the rear seat. She had seen the action, had caught its import, and Harry had a flashing glance from her dark eyes that sent the blood coursing to his fingers. Chilly too, however, had seen the swift exchange. He frowned, then laughed again.

"You should join the Salvation Army," he said, satirically. "They've a rescue corps, I believe. I know a pretty ensign, and she shall come and pin a nice little medal on your manly chest!"

Harry smiled without resentment. "The Army might not be so bad; it's an outdoor life at any rate. You'd be better for more of that."

"I believe you," said Chilly lugubriously. "It's getting impossible indoors. Nothing doing but moral lectures nowadays. If it weren't for the Duchess I'd cut it."

"For 'somewhere east of Suez, where a man can raise a thirst'?" quoted the other mildly. "Travel is expensive, Chilly."

"Yes, confound it," was the reply. "So is the thirst. The old man only allows me fifty dollars a month and I've stuck up every bar in town to the limit."

A frown was on Harry's brow. A year ago this youth had confined his daily potations to the club, and his drinking-bouts to that sequestered resort, "The Springs." Now he drank openly in corner saloons—he, the son of a southern gentleman, a member of the Supreme Bench, whose forebears had been courtly and clean-living from the days of the Colony! They had turned into the apartment-building now, and a moment later were in Harry's sitting-room, whose windows opened upon a square musical with lisping leaves and the cool splash of a fountain.

It was an apartment that bespoke a keen though sober artistic taste: grey walls with violet silk curtains at the deep windows and two or three old paintings—among these, set on an easel, a Greuze that he had unearthed in a cobwebbed curio-shop in Italy—a plain desk with a strip of dull-coloured damask whose quaint Russian needle-work set off a few books in tooled leather—a square piano of Circassian walnut spread with an old brocade, against which a bowl of peonies splashed their fleshy crimson—and deep, comfortable chairs. Into one of these Chilly threw himself.

"Well," he said, "here we are, as per schedule. So trot out your drink."

"It was that I wanted to talk to you about. I think you know I'm your friend, Chilly, and what I say I say as a friend. Whisky is getting the better of you."

"Pshaw!" scoffed Chilly, easily. "You weren't always so mighty particular. When did you climb onto the water-wagon, I'd like to know?"

"When I found I was better off there. I haven't touched liquor for a year. Take my advice, Chilly—it's sound!—and try to cut the drink out. It's doing you harm."

Chilly laughed. "That seems to be the signal all along the line!" he said humorously. "But what's the good? I could knock off any time I chose, just as well as you. But I don't intend to do it yet awhile. I like it."

There was a tentative knock at the door. It opened and a girl's piquant face peered in. "Chisholm Allen!" said Nancy Langham's indignant voice. "Have you forgotten you have an engagement to take me to the kennels this afternoon?"

Chilly sprang forward and seized her small gloved hands. "Come in," he said. "There's nobody here but Harry and me. Please do, Nancy."

"Oh, I mustn't!" She turned to the latter. "You see I needed Chilly so tremendously, and Echo told me she saw him with you. I expected to meet him on the way. Then I thought I'd just ring and ask for him, only the hall door was open. Chilly, you're outrageously undependable. You know I wanted to get that dog to-day, because I'm going to leave for home to-morrow, and you do know more about dogs than any one else."

Chilly looked a little shame-faced. "I forgot all about it, Nancy. Honestly, I did."

She sighed. "That's the fact, no doubt, but it's not one bit complimentary. You're so dreadfully truthful, Chilly! Come along now, or we'll be too late."

"All right," he answered, drawing her inside the door. "Just a minute. Harry's going to give me a drink. Weren't you, Harry, eh?"

For answer the other pressed a button and a trim silk-robed Japanese came noiselessly from the next room. "Fetch a bottle of Evien, Suzuki," he said, "and some glasses. Have it cold, please."

Chilly stared. "Mineral water!" he exclaimed with sulky discomfiture. "My word! This is no signal for the H2O. I'm dry!"

Harry shook his head. "I'm sorry, but it's a rule of my house."

Chilly shrugged. For an instant a little sneer drew down his lips, irritation fighting with his seldom-failing good-humour. He turned to the square piano, sat down on its stool, and ran his fingers up and down the ivory keys.

"I'll return good for evil," he said. "Before we go I'll give you a little ballad I've just composed. It's bound to make a great hit when it strikes the Barbary Coast. He struck a resounding chord, and with a wink at Harry, began to sing:

"The rounder swore at his barroom score
'Ere he called for a last, long bottle,
And proceeded to tint, without any stint,
His nose with a mellow mottle.
Then he climbed on a chair and hiccoughed long
And loudly he sang this funny old song:

"'Money is dross,
Loving is loss,
There's never a crown that is worth its cross!
Life is a toss,
Dying is moss,
But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!'"

There was something of whimsical fun, yet of bitter recklessness in the spectacle. Without technical training, Chilly had music in his finger-tips and a fair baritone voice. The fingers wavered now and then and the voice was shaken a little, but it was full of magnetism, as, swaying lightly on the stool, he rolled out the slangy doggerel with all the unction of a music-hall artist:

"Then the mixer laughed till the cat went daft
And the roof clanged all its gutters,
While the loungers yelled with mirth unquelled
Till they shook the very shutters;
And a sweet-faced devil peeped over the steins
And merrily carolled the lilting lines:

"'Money is dross,
Loving is loss,
There's never a crown that is worth its cross.
Life is a toss,
Dying is moss,
But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"

Harry's nerves were on edge. It was not the cheap vulgarity of the jingle nor the patent swagger of the performer, but the under-suggestion of the picture. The edge of this qualm had touched him on the street, with the odour of Chilly's breath and the moist tang of hops that had floated through the swinging-door. Now he felt a sudden anger that the coarse picturing and the tinkling keys had power to call up, even for an instant, the old slinking, craving ache in his throat.

Chilly swung round and got up laughing. "Pretty good, eh, what?" he said. "Come along, Nancy; we'll go and pick out that dog! So long, Harry."

Harry opened the door for them. He did not trust himself to speak. As Nancy's hand lay an instant in his on the threshold, a wave of sudden pity engulfed him. Her cheeks were mist-pale and her girlish lips were trembling.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HEART OF A MAN

An hour later Harry sat in the same pleasant room, looking out where curdled clouds set their silver sails in the pale shimmer of sky. A light breeze fluttered the figured-silk curtains, a blue-bottle buzzed tentatively to and fro outside, and birds were fluting in the trees of the small park and splashing joyously in the fountain.

The encounter with Chilly had broken into his mood, which had been occupied with more inviting things. Now, alone, the thought of what this day held for him absorbed him. "One year!" he had said to himself on the day of that old court-house trial. "That is the test I will give myself. It is enough. If I can beat the brandy for a year, I can beat it forever!" To-day was an anniversary; this afternoon the year was up. The period had called up all his courage, had searched out with prying fingers every crevice of weakness, explored insistently each avenue of uncontrol. But he had won the long battle, and the resurgence of the old power that had come to him in his yesterday's speech had crowned the victory with confidence. Yesterday he would have died sooner than to have wrung from his lips what he should say to her—to Echo—to-day!

When the tall old clock in the corner next chimed he rose and called, "Suzuki!"

The Japanese servant of spotless raiment entered with noiseless footsteps.

"Tell Aunt Judy I sha'n't want dinner to-night," said Sevier; "I'll dine at the club. You can take the night off, if you like; I'll let myself in."

"Hai-e!" Suzuki sucked in his breath and his oval eyes allowed themselves a gleam of satisfaction. As he brought his master's hat and stick Harry looked at him meditatively, wondering, as he had wondered a thousand times, what lay behind that secret-keeping, brown face with its perpetual, half-smiling gravity. He had picked him up a half-dozen years before in his travels, a shabby and abject adventurer with an English dialect that was fearfully and wonderfully made; and the youthful flotsam had speedily and without apparent tuition blossomed forth into that inestimable jewel, a perfect valet. With Aunt Judy the cook, who had been a servant of his father's, Bob the chauffeur who was her son, and Suzuki, Harry's bachelor ménage in the city stood a model of its kind, and the despair of his associates.

Harry walked slowly along the street clanging with cars, on pavements busy and sunny at first and giving place gradually to wedges of lawn and stretches of deserted foliaged flagging as he approached the suburbs. At the big gate of Midfields he lifted his eyes. Mrs. Allen was just stepping from her electric at the curb, cool and statuesque and smiling.

"A penny for your thoughts!" she said. "I really believe you were counting the flag-stones. I hope you were coming in—you've been shamefully oblivious of our pleasure this season!"

"I've been oblivious of my own," he countered, opening the gate for her. "But I'm going to make amends in future."

They walked leisurely up the drive under the acacias, chatting. She had often wondered, in the old days, whether there were not some understanding between him and Echo, and his long absence had puzzled her. But he had apparently gone nowhere else, and she welcomed his return. He was a distinctly eligible parti, and Echo had reached a point where the future was a pertinent thing. There had never been between the mother and daughter that close rapport which existed between daughter and father; Mrs. Allen had never felt that she understood Echo. She had never known for her, even as a child, the fierce and excluding yearning which she had lavished on Chisholm, and which had grown even stronger with the latter's increasing years and delinquencies. But she had Echo's interests thoroughly at heart, and Harry Sevier—particularly since his speech at the Opera House—had attained to importance in her worldly estimation.

"I haven't congratulated you," she said presently. "Your speech! It was a masterly thing."

"You were there? I'm glad I didn't know it. It would have deepened the blueness of my funk."

"Flatterer!" She tapped him on the arm with her parasol. "But I'm not wholly pleased, I assure you. The headlines are prophetic, I'm afraid. Presently the politicians will seize upon you, and the first we know you will be in Congress—or the Senate—and the town will have lost you. That's the way it goes!"

"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "who is the flatterer now?"

They had reached the big porch and she drew him into the hall and to the blue parlour, where the Judge sat with Echo, leisurely munching toast. "I've brought Mr. Sevier," she announced, "with his laurels thick upon him, just in time for tea. For my part, I am a wreck from the sun and I shall take mine in my room. But you'll come soon again, won't you?"

She passed out, faintly smiling and leaving a perfume of heliotrope behind her, without waiting Harry's answer, which seemed indeed to be given to Echo, since his hand held hers at the moment and his eyes were on her face. The sight for him had blotted everything else. The restful room with its cool shadows, the Judge—all seemed to retire into an inextinguishable and meaningless background, leaving only them two, together. In the year past he had never been so near her; now he marked that while her hair had the same familiar whorl and golden under-lights, her face seemed more serious than of old, her eyes deeper and more wistful.

Since that far-away evening at the Country Club, Echo had passed through a confusion of experiences, the more trying as they had been locked in her own breast. It had been more than Harry Sevier: it was her love for him that had been fought over during that long year. When he had left her that night with his kiss burning on her hand, she had known instinctively that he had gone to do battle. What she had said had stung him deeply, yet she could not have recalled a word. It had been the cry of wounded pride, of stricken ideals, of reproach, of protest against the dominancy of the thing she hated over the man she loved. As the long months of autumn and winter wore away she had seemed, with a singular clarity of vision, to see his temptation and to enter spiritually into his struggle. They had met only a few times and then in public places and more than once her eye had distinguished the traces of the conflict. Something deep in her had told her that when he came to her again that conflict would be ended. So, at sight of him on the threshold, Echo's heart had leaped into turbulent beating. Here, at last, they were face to face—it was the closure of the past, the burgeoning of the new!

There was a desultory conversation over the tea, and then the Judge went back to his chair in the library, and they two strayed out through the open French-window to the wide porch. There, on the top step, she sat down, leaning back against one of the big columns, up which a crimson rambler climbed. He sat lower, at her feet. The smile had faded from both their faces, and a rose that was on her breast, from the tumult of her heart, showered its petals on the stone. He could see the old sun-dial gleaming from its tangle of ivy. He knew its quaint motto:

Hours fly, flowers die.
New men, new ways,
Pass by;
Love stays.

After a silence he lifted his gaze.

"You didn't think," he said in a low voice, "that I stayed away because I—because that same thing had ever happened since the day of the trial?"

"No," she answered, gently, "I knew it hadn't."

A uniformed imp on a bicycle—a postal messenger—careened wildly up the drive with a special delivery letter. They saw him deliver it to old Nelson at the side portico and pedal whistling down a by-path.

"Then," he said quickly, "you know now that it never can again? It has been a year, a round year to-day. I made up my mind that I would not come to you till the last day was out."

"I felt that, too," she said. "I knew what you were thinking. I—I even guessed the year. Was it—so hard?"

"Yes," he answered. "But it would have been harder if I hadn't found it out when I did. The sting of all these months," he went on, "has been your thought of me! Every day, every hour, I have seen you as you looked that night at the 'Farm.' I shall never deserve that look again—Echo!"

She turned toward him at that, as if with a sudden impulse, her eyes like sapphire stars, her lips parted, but she did not speak. The failing sunlight spattered down through the moving foliage in green-gilt flashes that tinged her face and touched her hair with the soft burnish of Venetian gold, like that of a figure he remembered in St. Mark's. Behind her reared the seamed and grey old column—a faded background of age for a figure of immortal youth—and he knew suddenly that the picture of her, as he saw her at that moment, had covered forever the painful memory. There was only the ardent, unconditional now: only Echo and the dear old porch and the dimming daylight—and a bluebird singing from the heart of a tree—ever henceforward to be symbols to him of woman's love and—home!

He leaned toward her, his hand groping for hers, outstretched on the cool stone beside her, and said in a voice shaken, in spite of himself:

"Echo—it is just as it was a year ago, isn't it?"

She caught her hand—the one he groped for—to her cheek. She rose, and for an instant it seemed as if she had not heard. Then her glance wavered and fell and a bright, rich colour stained her cheeks like a sudden flush of rosy sun-set. But she had slightly turned away and he did not see it.

"Ah!" he said, looking up at her. "I may say it now—may I not?—what you must have known all along. I love you, I love you! Only you and your love, dear—that is all I ask of God!... Echo—"

There was a sudden sound behind them, a hoarse cry from the room they had left. Both turned sharply toward the French-window. Then she was down the long porch like a flying shadow.

He followed, to find her bending over the form of her father, slipped sideways on the leathern sofa, his face bluish-white and a paper crumpled in his rigid hand. At the same moment Nelson thrust his woolly head through the rear door.

"Quick!" she cried, kneeling beside the couch. "He has fainted. Call mother." He went, his aged features twitching with fright.

"I will send Doctor Southall," said Harry quickly. He touched her hand, and with a single backward look at her, hurried out. She heard his step speeding down the gravel drive.

Echo laid a tremulous hand upon her father's, and at the touch the tense fingers relaxed and a crumpled brown paper dropped from them. She snatched it up—was that what had made him faint? She spread it out: it was a photographic print, unmounted, of the last page of a letter, in his own handwriting. Across the top was printed, in the purple, noncommittal lettering of a typewriter, "For possible release May 3rd."

Then as she gazed, over the agitation of her face grew a shocked bewilderment that rushed headlong to realisation. She started to her feet, and a vivid scarlet flooded her pale face from chin to brow, then slowly ebbed, leaving behind it a frozen anguish. The print fell from her hand. At the same moment the Judge stirred and opened his eyes. He saw her standing before him; knowledge slipped back.

"Echo—"

She turned swiftly. He had struggled to a sitting posture—his gaze fastened on the crumpled paper on the rug. A little spasm crossed his face. "Reach me that," he said.

She picked it up and laid it in his hand, and he put it into his pocket with shaking fingers. He passed his hand across his forehead. "Where's Sevier?" he asked dully.

"He went to send the doctor. We were on the porch and heard you cry out."

"Ah, yes, I—remember. I tried to call you. I lost track of things for a minute or two, I reckon, But it's nothing. I've had little spells like this before. I don't need Southall—send Nelson to tell him not to come. I'm all right."

Unheeding her protests, he rose and went to his chair, as Mrs. Allen, with unaccustomed agitation on her face, swept into the room.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL

Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray on which was a little huddle of brown ashes—all that remained of the photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him. He sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves and moonshine.

He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.

All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single lapse—that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters of his nature. It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually—as a spotless lily springs from the silt—a flower of recompense, which, its roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later life. His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the missed. And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him! Unless he paid the penalty—with his professional integrity!

The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was lost. His had not been. It had only been covered. Somewhere that old leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn of the wheel to bring it to light. By some satanic twist of circumstance it had come to the hands of his enemy—Craig was his enemy now—and in his hands it spelled his own ruin. What weapon was there to fight with? None. However dastard the act that spread it to the world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited, undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those things which were the breath of his life. He thought of his wife—of Echo. For them humiliation, looks askance. His decision on the Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer—lacking only his signature writ at the bottom—the most vital and far-reaching decision of any he had rendered. On the first of May it was to be handed down. He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!" On that day he would be placarded in the public prints!

A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find thee out." He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no. But chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes. Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision, perjured himself. Right, by another judgment, would have its way in the end. The act would save him from shame—would save others as well. What did it matter? Would not such a solution be best for all concerned?

"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"—it was curious how the banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered! Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one other road by which he could evade the issue.

He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A small silver-mounted revolver lay there—pointing the one way out. He picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal, then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and began to write: "Dear Echo—"

He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte and—"

He paused an instant and listened—his hearing had caught some sound above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a softened memory!

It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than her mother—afterward—that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a passing phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now, through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless woman—of a blackmailer.

For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his complete undoing, in his youth, now—a very wanton!—holding out the badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd." Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was to be spread broadcast—unless he met the demand! The hideous vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional, well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.

Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains—her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.

The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold. His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.

What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?" he muttered. "It is justifiable—it is neither gross nor cowardly—to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly—of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand—toward the silver-mounted revolver.

But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.

As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in the room. Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling. He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet.

He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet

She came to him quickly, a little diffidently. "I couldn't help it, dear! I felt you—worrying, and I had to come." Suddenly her eyes fell on the revolver on the desk. She sprang and snatched at it in panic. "That! Oh, not that! Not that!"

"I—it was in my drawer," he said. "Surely you—"

"Ah," she cried. "I know! You—you received a letter this afternoon. It made you faint. You haven't been yourself since you read it. And now you—"

He drew a shaking hand across his eyes. "No, dear," he said more steadily. "It would not have been—what you think. There was a moment when—but it has gone, and forever." He took the revolver from her hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it. "There," he said, "I give you the key. It will not happen now." There was in his wailing speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.

Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarrassment. "Can you—can't you tell me what the letter was?"

He looked at her palely, his features working. She would have to know soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her. What would she think of him? "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was a young man, I wrote an—an unwise letter. It—it had to do with some one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I—I treasure. The threat is made now to publish it, and this would—would shame and harm that memory and me."

"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy had painted was fading out. "Then how—"

"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."

"And it must come back to hurt you—to spoil your life now! Something written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming thing at which she had snatched. "But you can pay the price, no matter how much it is! Take my pearls—my rings—my gowns."

He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."

She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"

"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests—but you would not understand."

She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless warfare in political life—acts of "character assassins" which knew neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.

"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."

She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to marry him, who had asserted his love for her—he, now bent on her father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw, those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken face.

"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not 'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."

She rose to her feet. Her heart was beating so that her breath came with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes. "You will hand down the decision." It was a statement, not a question.

"God help me—I must!"

"When?"

"A week from to-day, as I have announced."

She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead. Even in that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a passing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.

"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily. "You are going to your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"

She nodded, her cheek still against his. "I shall take the early train, before you are up. But I shall be back next day."

She withdrew her arms. "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked at the locked drawer. "You will not—you will not—"

"I promise," he said.

"Whatever happens?"

"Whatever happens."

An instant later she was gone.

CHAPTER XV

THE ONLY WAY

As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived long ago and discarded—as if she were suddenly an intruder into the peace and quiet it enfolded. For though her hands were like ice, her veins were beating hot and her mind was filled with the heat of a fiery furnace.

Cameron Craig held her father's name, his career, his whole happiness, and that of them all—her mother, Chilly, herself—in his hand. His was the power to crush and to ban. This man had professed to love her. She remembered what he had said to her that day in the garden—a year ago: "Since I met you the whole world has been changing for me.... You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done ... Echo, Echo!" The words seemed to wreathe about her, to return to her in pelted reverberations from the wall. She could save the situation. She could marry Cameron Craig.

The weird thought had rushed through her like a cold flame with the voicing of that name in the library. He would do it. More than the decision, more than any material ambition, he desired her. The letter—and the photographic plate—should be the price!

As she fought with herself through the long night hours, distraught yet tearless, it came to her with agonised reiteration that the resolve marked the end for her of all that makes life young. Up to a year ago she had been a girl; her deeper emotions had been unstirred, her soul unknown to herself. Only from the moment at the "Farm" when she had sent Harry Sevier from her to his battle with appetite, had she known the real meaning of life. Since then she had had the sweetness of learning love's unfolding in denial, and that very day it had come to fruition. Could it have been only that afternoon that the confession had trembled on his lips, when her heart had seemed to beat audibly, like little songs of joy? Now the cup was dashed from her lips. And he would never know—she could never tell him! That was the deep and piteous treason to which she must contribute!

She crept to the window and looked out over the garden, its elfish vapours dimly lighted by a thin, silver crescent-moon that seemed hanging like a gipsy ear-ring from a swarthy cloud. Below her the box-bordered paths showed in a sunken cross. The hemlock in its centre, with its triple spires, had been brought, a tiny seedling, by her great-great-grandmother from White Sulphur Springs, rooted in a gourd tied on the back of an old buff-coloured coach. The old lady's quaint portrait hung still in the dining-room, just above the diamond-leaded cabinet that held the tea-set of gold and lapiz lazuli blue, from which Jefferson and Randolph had drunk, and her garlanded silver basket whose inscription read, "From a lover of fifty years to his bride."

Echo felt a little shiver in her heart, as painful contrasting pictures thronged before her disordered fancy—pictures of herself as Craig's wife. She saw herself, young in years but with sere joys and blasted ideals, all youth's impulses dead in her, the wife of a man whose bodily presence she loathed and whose character, even before this, she had detested. A chill passed through her, and she dropped the curtain and shut out the moonlight. But what if her father stood ruined, the mark of public pity and covert sneers? She thought of the pearl-handled revolver. He would have given his life to checkmate fate, if that had but been possible to him. And she was his daughter!

But to give herself, her body, her soul! To go to this man, to live with him, to bear his name—she shrank from the thought as at the touch of white-hot iron.

When the tiny ormolu clock on her dressing-table struck five she drew up the blind. Dawn, with its coral sandals, was tiptoeing over the garden, hanging dew-diamonds on the rose-bushes, swinging her censer of multifold perfume to the waking flute of the birds. She bathed her face and smoothed her hair, then put on a dark travelling dress and packed a small bag, putting into it only linen and a few toilet-accessories, with a closed silver frame, heart-shaped, whose twin sides held miniatures of her father and mother. Last she unlocked a tin box in her drawer, took some money which it contained and put it in her pocket. Then, bag in hand, she went downstairs.

In the dining-room Nelson held up his hands, pink-lined palms outward.

"Mah Goodness, honey!" he ejaculated. "Reck'n yo' didn' sleep 'tall las' night, what wid Marse Beve'ly took so yistidy. Yo' look jes' lak er ghos'. Now yo' set down en drink some hot coffee en eat plenty chick'n en waffles. Ain' gwine find nuthin' half ez good on dat ar' dinin'-cyah, nohow!"

The warmth of the coffee was grateful to her, and while the old man hovered about her she made a pretence of eating, answering his protestations with monosyllables, in fact scarcely knowing what she said, for her mind was busy with other things. 'Lige, the driver, would wait to put her on the train—she must take the up-train then, as he expected her to do. And it was an express: she could not leave it till it reached the junction, hours later. There, however, she could take the other road—the Southern. There must be an afternoon train, and that, though by a round-about way, would bring her finally to her destination.

When carriage-wheels sounded from the drive she went into the library and seated at her father's desk, wrote a note. It was to Harry Sevier. She sealed and addressed it with a hand that shook a little, and gave it to Nelson with instructions to send it during the morning. The old negro put her into the carriage, with her bag and tucked the cover about her with loving hands.

She caught a breath, uneven like a child's. "You'll—take good care of father, Nelson?"

"Bress yo' li'l ha'at, ah'm sho' gwine watch Marse Beve'ly lak er hawk. He'll be all right, en yo' be back termorrer."

"Yes," she said faintly.

As the carriage whirled into the roadway, she turned her head to cast a straining gaze up the silent drive to the old house. Then the acacias shut it from her view.

CHAPTER XVI

DERELICT

In Harry Sevier's outer office his clerk glanced backward with a startled expression, his law-book dropping from his fingers. "That's queer," he muttered. "I never heard him laugh like that before. Doesn't sound like a joke, somehow."

He rose and tapped lightly on the inner door, which he had closed upon his employer a moment before. But there was no response and he went back to his seat—and the volume he was studying. "Wonder if it was that note I gave him," he speculated.

The tap had fallen on deaf ears. Harry was sitting in the other room, rigidly staring at the note in question. There was on him a feeling of actual physical sickness. He did not know that he had laughed. At last he rose, and crumpling the written sheet into a ball, laid it in the fire-place and struck a match. His fingers worked clumsily and he broke several short off before a flame showed and he stooped painfully and held the match to its edge. He remained in the crouching posture while the paper blazed merrily up. In the charring heat it crackled and opened, showing for a brief instant in the baleful, blackening, light two sentences it had contained: "Think as gently of me as you can. I can never marry you—never."

He stood up dazedly and groped his way to a chair. So this was the end! She, Echo, whom he had thought so true, she had been playing with him—and now the game was over. To her he had been only a puppet, a card in hand to be played off, discarded for the winning of the greater point. Poor, brainless, fool that he was! There was no longer a yesterday—no dear eyes holding his, no Eden wind blowing the rose-petals nor silver stars swinging the incense of the gods! He had been living in a fairy-tale, a castle in Spain, a fool's paradise, hugging a ridiculous dream, that had had no reality to her, had been but a chapter of coquetry, to which she now wrote finis! "Think gently!" This was the epitaph of her flirtation with Harry Sevier—flung away, raked under, thrust from sight, a thing for the scare-crow and the scavenger!

He got up and going slowly to the window, stood many minutes with his forehead against the pane.

What remained for him? To sweep out of his life the shards of that beautiful thing that lay destroyed forever? To saunter on, with hypocritical smirk and affected nonchalance, down the empty declivity of professional habit, to an undesirable goal? To what end? Of what value had been his striving? A year ago he might have won her—no one else had had more than a slight hold upon her then. It had been that long denial that he had set himself that had undone him! What profit to him that he had won the mastery over himself, had cut the tentacle coils that were enwinding him? Of what had been the use?

There darted through his racked mind the sorry jingle that Chilly had once roared in his rooms:

"Money is dross,
Loving is loss,
There's never a crown that is worth its cross.
Life is a toss,
Dying is moss,
But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"

Why not "cut it all," as Chilly had longed to do? Plunge out along the numb, reckless way whose well-remembered mile-stones suddenly beckoned him—anyhow, anywhere, only to muffle the pain that plucked at him—to sodden and sink himself in blessed oblivion, like a stone in a pool!

A thing that had lain torpid and dormant in the dregs of his being thrust up its head. It was as though a chain snapped in his brain, and what had been shackled there reared, savage and exultant. On the desk sat a photograph in a silver frame. Once he had been used to turn this face-down when that cabinet was opened a year ago! He picked this up and with a sudden wrench of his powerful fingers bent and broke it across again and again, crushing metal and board into a shapeless battered twist, and flung it into the fireplace. He snatched up a heavy paper-weight and with one blow smashed in the door of the little wall-cabinet. The glass fell in a shower of silvery tinkles to the floor. He seized the black bottle that sat there—with the rusty goblet—poured the latter to the brim and drank it off—once, twice, three times.

He went into the main office. Its occupant was on his feet in alarm at the crash of shattered glass in the next room. "How much money is there on the premises?"

The clerk looked in a drawer. "About sixty dollars. It's the last payment on—"

"Give it to me," said Sevier shortly. He pocketed the wad of bills the other handed him. "I'm going on a journey—abroad," he said. "I may be gone some time—in fact, I know I shall. Don't forward anything, and close up the office till I return. You will draw, as usual, of course." In another moment he was giving directions—over the complaisant wire—to his bank. He had always kept his leisure clear by putting the small details of daily routine book-keeping, as he expressed it "on the other fellow"; however long his desertion, rent and camp-followers should be paid with regularity.

Ten minutes later his valet, in a suit of spotless white linen, let him into his apartment.

"I'm off for a vacation, Suzuki," he said. "To-night, when Bob comes for orders, tell him to put the car up till I want it. You can go to night-school and rub up your 'Yingleesh.'"

The Japanese blinked. "A'right," he said. "When we see you some more?"

"When I get back." Sevier lifted a book from the table. "Take this to Mr. Treadwell's—his house, not his office—you understand. There's no message; it belongs to him. Don't wait; go at once."

When he had closed the outer door on the valet, Harry drew a long breath. He opened another door and listened. He could hear Aunt Judy rattling crockery in the kitchen, humming as she laboured. He would be undisturbed, the coast was clear. His veins were beating hot now with the brandy, and the sickness was gone. In the old days the reaction had been slow and grudging. But during the year his body had refreshed itself. The inured crust of usage was stripped away, and the physical side responded speedily.

He went into his dressing-room and threw open the huge walnut wardrobe that effaced one wall. It was hung from end to end with clothing. He selected a cheap dun-coloured suit which he had purchased abroad years before for a walking-tour, of whose strenuous occupations it showed some traces in wear, a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, companion of sundry long-ago fishing excursions. He took a nail-scissors and painstakingly cut from each article its maker's name. In the bath-room, first with shears and then with a razor, he cut off his crisp dark beard: never, since his college days abroad, had he seen his own face like that.

Finally arrayed, he regarded himself in the cheval-glass. The Harry Sevier of sumptuous apparel and perfect grooming, the familiar spirit of the place, was gone. In his stead there stood an unfamiliar presence, with smooth-shaven chin and knock-about clothing. And the stranger looked from the depths of the mirror with a gaze from which something tempered and remorseful had vanished, a gaze of avid recklessness and strange, irresponsible daring, the look of one standing on the sheer verge of any hazard, welcoming any throw of the dice, fearing nothing and caring nothing.

As he stood, his hand encountered a small hard object in his pocket. He drew it out. It was a ring, roughly made and holding an uncut emerald almost square in shape. He remembered that once, in the woods, he had bought it for a whim from some gipsy caravan—a luck ring. Much luck it had brought him! Well, it was the gipsy-road now for him. He drew off his seal ring and thrust the other on his finger in its place.

He went quickly out the front door and down to the entrance pulling his hat brim well over his eyes on issuing to the street. As he did so he grazed a lady leisurely passing. It was the plump and pretty Mrs. Spottiswoode. Her glance met his fairly, but there was no sign of recognition; she only drew her trim, modish skirt away from the contact as she passed on.

He walked more rapidly now. He could scarce keep from running—would have done so but for the thronging crowds. The brandy he had drunk in the office had roused the devil of craving; it was in his throat now like the rasp of hot sand-paper and he craved more alcohol with a desperate craving that would not be denied. At the edge of the open square which held the railroad station he plunged into a saloon and pushed through its groups of loungers to the bar.

"A flask of whisky—the best you have," he said.

The bar-tender wiped his hands on his duck jacket and took down a squat bottle. "O. and S.," he said, affably. "Just blown in to town?"

Harry stared him in the eye. "Wrap that thing up, and be quick about it!" was his answer.

The man in the duck jacket muttered something under his breath, banged the package on the bar and rang up the payment on the cash-register with an angry jingle.

Harry thrust his purchase under his arm, went out, crossed the square and climbed aboard a train that was drawing out. He went rapidly forward to the smoker; there he—and the bottle he carried—would be unnoticed. As he sat down in the rear seat, the conductor passed by. Harry had no ticket. He handed him a bill.

"Where to?" asked the other briefly.

"How far do you go?"

"Birmingham."

"To Birmingham, then," said Harry.

The afternoon wore on, station after station went by. The man in the rear seat sat with his eyes straight before him, moveless except as from time to time he lifted a bottle to his lips and drank thirstily, avidly. The frenzied pain was gone now, leaving only a dull ache, and gradually, very gradually, this too slipped away into the void. He was now once more the man who had fled in his motor from the face of a convict in a court-room, flying through the night in a jumbled dream, strung upon a headlong speed through vacuity.

Evening came, with the glamour of peach-blown valleys and honey-lipped hills, lying under pale stars against the sunset. Night fell, with its cooler breeze through the windows, its glimpses of quiet, watching woods, of white mists wreathing across the meadows, of yellow lights. But Harry took no heed. Only hours later, when the train rolled into a great rotunda did he turn his head. He did not know where he was. He did not even wonder. He rose, kicked the emptied bottle under the seat, and left the train.

He went out of the station. It sat on a ridge above a great river and on the lower level he had a glimpse of a sordid purlieus of rambling streets, red-paned windows and gleaming doorways, the soiled earmarks of the city's slums.

He crossed the street and plunged aimlessly down a narrow alley toward the water-front.

CHAPTER XVII

LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

The potations in the smoking-car had had their first effect. Sevier had passed from the jumbled dream now—was safe enisled in that strange fourth-dimensional empire into which he had first wandered during that wild night-ride in his motor, that region of tense consciousness that was yet without rule, in which every sense was acute, his brain clear as ice, but where impressions recorded themselves without co-ordination. Eye and ear drank in avidly each sight and sound, and he sniffed the thick smells as a hound sniffs a haunting but forgotten trail.

As he went further the dwindling signs of respectability vanished. He was now below the city's "dead-line" where, in segregated wantonness, vice and license unrolled their audacities fearless of the complaisant police regulations.

A hundred yards from the greasy docks lining the sluggish current from which a plumy mist was lifting, a wide screened doorway showed a blaze of electric-light upon a patch of saw-dust floor. Through it poured the tinny blare of a gramophone hooting a comic song, mingled with rumbling laughter and raised voices. It was a low-roofed, shambling building, planned for the delectation of the barge-man and the roustabout and now throbbing with their daily—and nightly—pleasures. Harry halted before it.

"Tough joint, eh?" The voice fell suddenly at his elbow.

He turned. The speaker was red-cheeked and brisk, with dapper sophistication and inquisitiveness written all over him. His shining straw hat had a coloured band, there were white pearl buttons on his patent-leather shoes and a natty stick swung lightly from his gloved fingers. "I can see you don't belong with that crowd," he said, nodding sagely toward the entrance.

"No," said Sevier. He was staring at the speaker with a penetrating intensity, thinking that, but for colouring and costume, they two somewhat resembled each other—speculating as to the slanting scar on the other's right cheek, that might have been the memento of a rusty nail or of a pet panther—thinking of these things and of a thousand things beside that were only remotely connected with either of them.

"Neither do I, but I take a high dive into it now and then. Let's go in and have a drink."

In Harry's middle distance another more decorous swing-door vibrated to and fro, with a sharp smell of hops, a rattle of glasses, a voice reckless but good-humoured—proposing a like libation. Beyond this in endless succession were openings and re-openings of a locked cabinet that had hung somewhere on a wall, and further yet, myriads of goblets, cut with shining prisms, reflecting rainbow colours on spotless napery. A drink?

"Why not?" he said, and striking open the door, led the way into the noisy interior, reeking with stale odours, with strong tobacco-smoke, with carouse and profanity. He strode across the floor, shouldering his way unceremoniously through the press, and sat down at a small deal table that was unoccupied. His companion seated himself opposite. He was looking at Harry with critical admiration, noting his lithe athletic build and the certain, confident swing of his movements. His eye lighted.

"Gad!" he said, with a little laugh. "To tell the truth I wouldn't have cared to come in here alone, though I've been in a good many shady boozeries. Allow me to introduce myself. My name's John Stark—that's the name I play under, that is. I'm an actor. I'm trying out a new play, the 'Jail-bird.' Perhaps you've seen the bill-boards."

"Of course," said Harry. The title sprang instantly into his mind, blazoned on a gaudy bill-board against a maple-shaded street:

"Do not fail to see this Talented Star
In his Gripping Drama, The Jail-Bird."

It multiplied, stamping itself on a thousand walls, a chromatic procession tumbling into the distance. The other nodded in a self-satisfied way. "It's a great play. Got the real human dope in it. It'll go big, too. That's why I come to these places—to study 'business.' See that teamster with the pock-marked face and the tattoo on his arm? What a make-up that would be!"

The burly, half-drunken driver, in red-flannel shirt with a snake-whip in his armpit, his back to the bar, poured from a gurgling black bottle. "Hear what it says?" he hiccoughed—"'It's good—s'good—s'good—s'good—s'good!'"

John Stark withdrew his eyes from the fascinating study, as a waiter, in an apron that had in some remote epoch aspired to white, with a strip of soiled towelling thrown over one arm, set two thick glasses on the table, with a surly "well?"

"I'll take a silver fizz," said the actor.

"The same," said Sevier—"and be quick about it!"

The harsh admonition thrust across the noise. The phrase had no meaning to Sevier, it had been merely the echo of another bidding that he had given at some other time, in some other world, repeating itself now when the hidden spring of association was touched. But it brought a resentful glare from the waiter. The loungers standing nearest shuffled truculently, and the teamster by the bar turned an ugly look upon them. The man in the dingy apron thumped down a black demijohn on the table.

"Take it straight or not at all," he said in a surly tone.

Harry's companion poured both glasses. He leaned across the table with sparkling eyes. "I'm in the title-role," he confided. "The story is like this. I'm a business man, and the other chap—he has a grudge against me—has me in his power. He's the Great What Ho—a regular top-notcher, plenty of money, a winner with the women, horses, steam-yacht, everything. The house he lives in was mine, but he's got it by trickery and seized it while I was abroad. I come back and find him in possession. But in the house—he doesn't know this, you see—hidden behind a panel in the library, are papers that will show him up and put him behind the bars. I've got to have those papers, and the only way is to get into the place and take them."

He paused and sipped from the glass before him, then resumed:

"Curious thing, luck. I've had no end of trouble getting up the scenery, but to-day I saw exactly the lay-out I want to picture—a whacking big house in this very town. Right in the heart of the city too, not a mile from here, but shut in from the road. Belongs to about the richest man in the place. I kodaked it for my scene-painter. Look here."

He took a pencil from his pocket and sketched rapidly on the deal table-top as he went on.

"It's set in trees and there's a wide, oval porch along the front—like this—fine old southern effect, eh?—with Cape Jessamine bushes under the windows. A long wing runs down one side—here. In there is the library. I come on in a kind of prologue, no lines—shadows and moonlight, town-hall clock striking off one side—you know. I'm desperate. I try the doors. They're locked, of course. But there's a little window on the second floor that's open. I climb up a trellis and crawl in. There I am in the house."

He stopped and emptied his glass.

"There's a two-minute dark—no curtain, but a quick change, then lights up and the stage shows the Great What Ho's library, with me on the threshold, for the opening scene. I get the papers from the panel, and just then—"

"Yes, yes," said Harry. He had been staring steadily at the other—staring with his outer eyes, but with that curious inner vision, which was the gift of the intoxicant he had drunk, seeing himself, detached and moving through the significant scene that was being sketched before him, his alert but liquor-bound mind filling in strange, lurid detail which rushed forward to crowd the obscure spaces. He reached forward and gripped the actor by the arm with a force that made him wince—"and then—"

A stillness had struck the noisier babble and Harry's mental connection on a sudden broke. A young woman in the red Jersey and poke-bonnet of the Salvation Army had passed about the room and was now standing by the table. She stretched her tambourine. "If you please, gentlemen," she said.

Harry laid a silver half-dollar in her tambourine and his companion did the same, when the waiter who had served them spoke to her: "Clear out, you. You've got your money, now go."

"And be quick about it!" said Harry, distinctly.

The remark had not the excuse of proprietorship and it roused fury in the sluggish minds about them to whom the addition was extraneous and gratuitous, a smug insult of one who from his manner belonged to a class that despised them, offered to one whose daily habit proved that she did not. With an oath the drunken teamster of the pock-marked visage lurched forward, rolling a red-flannel sleeve along a hairy biceps.

The dingy Ganymede thrust him back. "Leave him to me!" he ground savagely, and turning, struck at Harry with envenomed force.

The fist, however, did not reach home. Harry's brain and eye were working with the deadly precision of the practised athlete. The suggestion of combat was complete, and with sober caution and reason dead, the bodily mechanism rushed to meet it. There was a lightning-like parry—a crisp, smashing return blow. Then suddenly the room turned a shambles, a red surging mass of hands that tore, of thrown missiles, of shattering glass, through which sounded a shrill whistle and the tattoo of a thorn-baton on the pavement outside.

Two minutes later Harry stood unhurt in the open air, and a blue-jacket held the door against a cursing pandemonium. "Run, you fool!" he panted. "I can't hold it but a minute. Run!"

And Harry ran. Not from fear or dread, but in instant response to that mental spur, without reason, or logic, or conscious thought. The new mental formula for the present moment superseded the old. The dingy saloon, the effervescent young Thespian, the fight—all fell away, were gone, and there was only the rigid empty calm through which he sped, and far above him the sound of a wind like a silken sea. It was close on midnight, the more decorous streets into which he presently emerged deserted, for intermittent clouds were now blotting the moonlight and a sprinkle of rain was falling. The sparse pedestrians stared or shrank away, but none followed, no patrolling guardian of the law forbade. He ran without direction or purpose, until suddenly—he halted.

He had come to the side of a great enclosure, the grounds of a mansion, surrounded by a high stone wall with tiled top, in which was set a gate with tall posts holding dim-lit yellow globes. It was not at these, however, that Harry was looking; his gaze went beyond, where, touched by the rainy moonlight, stretched the long façade of a Colonial house with a wide oval porch. At one side was a wing, with a lattice climbing over its doorway, and the damp air was full of the scent of jessamine.

He stiffened. The contours fell with fateful correspondence over another picture which had been etched on his brain that night with the sharp outlines of a photographic plate. The old spring had been touched, and the eerie mechanism was responding. It was his own house, but now it sheltered the Great What Ho, and in that wing was hidden the thing he must secure for his own salvation!

Harry entered the gate and crept across the lawn, warily, from bush to bush. In the curious dual-consciousness that seemed to divide his self into two independent yet identical entities, he had no sensation of strangeness that he should already have made that slinking journey once before, that each detail should possess the quality of predestination. In the shadow of the ivied walls he softly tried the front door. It was locked, but he had known it would be. He looked up; he had known what he should see—the small window in the wing, open, as he could see from the swaying of the light curtain in the air.

He crept to the lattice and deftly and softly drew himself up. No twig snapped, scarce a leaf rustled beneath his careful movements. In a moment he touched the sill of the open window and slid inside.

He was in an upper hall and soft, luxurious carpet was under his feet. By the dim light from the window he crept noiselessly down the stair. There before him stood the door behind which lay the thing he must have. He put his hand on the knob, turned it softly and opened the door.

The mental picture which he had been tracing suddenly frayed and vanished like a dissolving view. The room was brightly lighted. At one side sat a great safe, beside whose steel door stood two men, one tall and thin, whose eyes glittered through the holes of a black cambric mask, the other short and stocky with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.

They stood like setters at point, crouching tensely forward, and the latter held a pistol levelled at him.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PRICE

With the sudden disintegration of the mental picture he had been tracing, and the instant stoppage of the tense action of mind and body, Harry Sevier came to himself. He awoke as he had done on the night of the trial, with the abrupt halt of his motor at the railroad-crossing—awoke instantly to knowledge of himself, but dazed and shaken, grasping at phantasmagoric fragments that were swiftly dissolving in his brain, in a bewilderment in which he could only stare voicelessly at the black mask that confronted him, at the round muzzle that spelled danger.

The man of the sand-coloured hair spoke: "It ain't him," he said in a low voice. "Not one of the servants, either." He stepped forward. "How did you get in?"

"I don't—know," said Harry. "Yes, I—I fancy it was through a window."

"What did you come for?"

"I wanted to—get something."

There was an instant's pause. Then his questioner came forward with a cat-like tread. His free hand busied itself in deft exploration. "No gun on him," he said.

Something like a chuckle came from behind the mask. "I reckon he's telling the truth, but he's a new one and we scared about all out of his head there ever was in it!"

The other turned one side to where a heavy portière screened an alcove, parted the curtains and set a chair in the hidden space. He pointed to it. "Sit there," he gruffly commanded, and to the man in the mask he added, "Get on with your part of the job. We won't take no risks—I'll take care of him!"

Harry sat down. The dream-like fragments at which he had been grasping were gone now into thin air, and out of the misty limbo the past was growing back: the note he had received, the smashed wall-cabinet, the fiery drink that scorched his throat, his mad masquerade, the boarding of the train at the station, the friendly, stupifying flash, then flight, on and on—and then, this lighted room, the safe, the levelled weapons! Into what sordid drama of the under-world had he wandered?

He flinched at the pressure of a cold steel ring against his temple—the man with the sand-coloured hair was "taking care" of him. The latter leaned forward and peered searchingly into his face. "Haven't I seen you before, somewheres?" he asked.

"Who knows?" said Harry. He had answered that look by one that, even as he spoke, had opened to strange intelligence. The stocky frame, the small red-rimmed eyes, the up-thrust, wiry hair belonged to his client of that far away trial, the man whom he had sent to a convict's cell and who now, by route of ball and stripe, had fled to the dismal demesne of habitual criminality! "Who knows!" Paddy the Brick had not now the piteous, shrinking look that had been turned to his counsel in the courtroom! The manhood was gone from the mottled features, which now wore the furtive look of the hunted, the sign-manual of cunning, incorrigibility and debauch.

Paddy the Brick withdrew his eyes. The involuntary question had passed. There was, after all, little in the smooth-shaven countenance of the man he guarded to suggest a bearded face that his memory searched for.

"Quiet!" warned the man in the mask, and kneeling by the safe door, resumed the delicate manipulation which had been so startlingly interrupted. He turned the combination swiftly and deftly, his side-face pressed against the unyielding steel, his ear listening intently to the fall of the tumblers that chattered like elfin castenets.

Harry sat silent and moveless, sharply conscious of the cold ring against his temple. Whither had his besotted flight carried him? To some distant city, into another state perhaps, where he now figured in a coarse and desperate adventure that might end anywhere, in some shameful expose which he could not foresee. In whose house was he? Whose money was it these nightly prowlers intended? And what ironic demon had beckoned him here to play this passive part in the despoiling?

There was suddenly a sharp click, a turn of the nickelled handle, and on mute hinges the safe-door opened. "So!" said the man in the mask, complacently. He began to pull open drawers and ransack pigeon-holes, his fingers passing deftly through the papers they contained.

On the instant there was a muffled sound in the hall outside—a door swinging to, and voices.

"S-s-s!" The low hiss was an incarnate menace. The man by the safe swung the steel door to, but without closing its lock, and snapped off the lights. The room fell into thick darkness. Harry felt, rather than heard, that the other had swiftly entered the alcove, and drawn the portière into place. His companion had made no sound, but the aching circlet bit hard again into Harry's temple, with a warning as sharp as it was silent.

The door opened, there was a groping footstep, then the lights went up, and a woman's voice, clear and imperious, mingled with the lower answers of the obsequious servant who had shown her in—a familiar voice at which Harry's blood seemed to grow still in his veins:

"No matter how late he is, I will wait. You say he is at his office—is it so near as that? Yes, I think you may send for him—no, wait—that telephone on the desk! Could I speak with him? No—I think after all I would rather wait. What number did you say? 'Seven-thirty-two Sumner?' Thank you. Then if he does not come soon, I will call him up. Thank you—no, I want nothing."

Harry repressed an impulse to cry aloud. A thin streak of light showed between the edges of the silken hanging, through which the man in the mask was peering, and for a slender instant, under the crook's elbow, he could see into the room. The slender figure standing there under the chandelier was Echo Allen!

She was in a dark travelling dress and wore a light veil through which her profile looked strained and white. The unexpected sight of her intensified the haggard pain of heart which had come back to Harry with his awakening, and this was staggered by the knowledge that they two were together in this unknown dwelling.

The door closed upon the servant. Behind the portière the red-rimmed eyes peered questioningly into the eyelet holes of the black mask. They said as plainly as speech, "There is only the woman. Why not make for the open—now?" But the other was an older hand. The room had but the single door and the servant might be standing on the other side. Grim danger lurked in hue and cry, and there was always the chance that the woman might weary of waiting and go. He had a liking for the long chance. He shook his head.

Harry's straining ears caught now the dragging rustle of a skirt. Echo was moving slowly across the floor, and in a moment he saw her again through the slender opening. She was standing tense and straight, her hands wrung together, finger twisting against finger, before the desk telephone. He saw her hand go out to the instrument, then draw back as though it had been a poisonous snake. Then suddenly he saw her seize the transmitter and put it to her ear. The bell whirred.

"Madison, seven-thirty-two."

There was a pause, in which she repeated the number, and in it Harry felt that her face had hardened and set, like some cooling plastic beneath an invisible mould.

"Is that—is it ... Mr. Cameron Craig?"

In spite of his iron control, Harry could not repress a start. He knew now where he was! The house behind whose curtain he perforce skulked with a brace of thieves, was Cameron Craig's! And she, on this very day, had journeyed here too. A sense of an overfate, sardonic and unescapable, rushed upon him. What a topsy-turveydom of chance, what a dove-tailing of accident, had wrought for this strange contretemps! In the instant she waited a harrowing question stabbed him. What was she doing here, to-night, at midnight—in this environment which had bred unseemly stories—to enter which, under such circumstances, a woman must be unmindful of what should be most dear?

"... Do you know my voice? Yes, you are right.... Unbelievable, yes. Many things are unbelievable that—happen. Listen. I am at your house, in your library.... No! Wait. I have something to say to you, now. You shall answer it first. Once you asked me to marry you. I will do so, on one condition.... The—the letters written by my father. You will not use them, publish them. You will give them into my hands.... Yes.... One has been photographed—yes, the plate. You swear to do so, when I am your wife? ... Yes, to-night—if you—wish.... What? In—in five minutes? ..."

The receiver clattered down upon the desk, as she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. To her the broken sentences had knelled hope gone, the passing of youth and love, the coming of a night in which was no star; but to the man sitting in such assiduous stillness behind the curtains, they had told a story that sent the warm blood coursing through his veins. Instead of being false to him, Echo was really sacrificing herself on the altar of name and family. She did not love the man with whom she had just spoken! It was constraint that had sent her there at that dubious hour, to make a bitter bargain. Letters written by her father? What they were—in what way compromising—Harry could not guess. Some indiscreet correspondence perhaps, which, twisted out of context, might be made ground of malicious political criticism. He knew her love for her father. In some way she had learned of these letters, had scented danger to him, and now would ward the harm from him at any cost to herself! "Think as gently of me as you can"—the words of her note passed through Harry's mind. When she wrote that she had known that she should give herself to Craig! He felt a whirl of rage. The cowardly, contemptible cad, who would have his desire at the cost of all that was decent and clean-handed! It should never be, never, never! Why else had fate dropped him there, like a stone from a sling? And yet for the moment he was as helpless as a rat in a trap. There, only a half-dozen steps away lay those letters, the safe door unlocked. Yet the steely pressure on his temple told him that a single word, a move, and he would be ingloriously past rendering aid to anybody, with a bullet in his skull.

Harry was conscious that the two men beside him exchanged glances—they were going to make a dash for it. His every nerve tightened. But at that instant the door opened upon the obsequious servant. "Did you ring, Madame?" he asked.

"I rang the telephone," she replied dully. "I called up Mr. Craig. He is coming."

"Very good, madame." This time he did not leave, but moved about the room, setting straight a book upon the table, adjusting a vase, glancing furtively at her the while. The moment for flight had passed.

Endless minutes ensued. Then in the strained silence there fell a sharp step outside, and the servant went quickly from the room. Harry felt a little tremor run over him. There was the sound of a key grating in a lock. The outer door opened and clanged shut.

Behind the portière Harry sat motionless, the muzzle of the weapon at his temple, his hair stirring to the suppressed breathing above his head, and the man in the mask shifted his felt-shod feet, restlessly but without sound.

CHAPTER XIX

PADDY THE BRICK INTERVENES

"I could not believe your voice." The heavy tones jarred across the quiet. "I could not believe that it was actually true!"

"Do you accept my offer?" Echo's voice was without a tremor; it held the same hard quality that controlled her features.

"Accept!" He came toward her—would have taken her hands, but that she drew back. "Do you remember what I told you that day in your garden, a year ago—that nothing counted, nothing but you? For you I would barter every ambition I have ever known. I would sell the world, if I had it!"

"When you told me that," she said steadily, "I answered that I did not love you. I have not changed in that regard, nor shall I ever change. I can bring you no love, but I can—can marry you."

He laughed harshly. "Very well; I would not have it different, after all. I am not made on the pattern of other men: I would rather take you against your will—you will be all the more mine! I love even that fine disdain of yours! For it shall not last—I swear that! You shall love me in the end, as I have loved you!"

"Loved!" she repeated, with an accent of chill and wondering scorn.

"Yes, loved!" The words were almost a cry: they held fierce protest, even anger, yet there was in them a kind of appeal that lent them a sombre and tragic dignity. "But you despised me! You had stood first of all things. But if you could be nothing to me, then the game I played stood second. I played, as always, to win. The cards fell oddly—your father's letters, no matter how, came into my hands. They were to my purpose, and I would have used them. Why should I hold back? Out of regard for him? I regard no man!"

"Yet he is my father. And you profess—ah, if this is love, I had rather you hated me! I know nothing of a love that is neither brave nor compassionate, that strikes at the aged and defenceless and that is without—honour!"

He had not taken his eyes from her face, and now there grew in them a strange, haggard fire. Relentless and unscrupulous as was that love of his, Harry could have pitied him at that moment. "Honour?" he said. "It is an empty word to me! What is honour, what is anything, to me without you—Echo, Echo!"

"If you love me so—and now, indeed, I will believe it—give me the letters!" She took a step toward him, her hands clasped together. "Be as chivalrous as you are strong! Do not do this ignoble thing to break my life! I may be your friend, if not—that other. Surely you cannot want to take me at such a price! Do this and all my life long I will be grateful! Oh, I would ask you on my knees! Give me the letters!"

He looked at her where she stood breathlessly, with arms extended, her face bent and pleading, and the sight opened wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with evil passions. The gentler purpose that for a heart-beat had fluttered white wings above the chasm dropped plummet-like into the depths. Give her up? Now, when she came to him with her offer? Resign her—to that tippling dilettante, that flamboyant fop and fool who had drowned his success in a bottle? Not he! A savage elation sprang up in him.

"When you are my wife!" he said.

She straightened, withdrawing her arms with a little gesture of despair and relinquishment. "Where are the letters?"

He pointed to the safe. "They are there."

"When will you give them to me?"

"To-night—the same hour you marry me. You shall burn them if you like, here—in this very room—with your own hands."

"You swear?"

"I do. And whatever else men may say of me, there is no man living who can say I have ever lied."

There was an instant's silence and when Craig spoke again all feeling had vanished from his voice. He was once more the deliberate and incisive man of action. He snapped the lid of his watch.

"It is very late," he said, "but it can be managed. It shall be at the hotel—you can rest there while I make the necessary arrangements. My chauffeur is off-duty to-night, but it is only a block away, fortunately. Shall you mind walking?"

"No," she said, apathetically.

Harry was holding himself hard. They were going. He saw clearly his course of action. His two partners in that sorry escapade might have what they had come for—he could compound with them, could take the letters to the hotel and put them into Echo's hands. She would never need to know how he had gained them—that drunken episode, whose very memory must bring a shaming flush to his cheek, should be buried forever! The letters would not have come to her from Craig, and she would stand absolved of her promise. But even as this ran through his mind, fate thrust its hidden hand from the cloud.

"One moment," said Craig. "When I came in, it was beginning to rain. You will need a cloak of some sort." He turned abruptly to the curtained alcove.

The pressure on Harry's temple relaxed. The black mask thrust forward, the man with the sand-coloured hair parted the hangings—his outstretched arm shot out toward the advancing figure. Harry's gaze saw something red leap up from Craig's temple, even before the terrifying concussion rocked the room—a sound threaded by Echo's scream.

There was a rush, a curse and a scramble, flying feet and a dismayed shout from the hall—then a shocked quiet in which he stood disconcerted and appalled, staring between the shielding curtains, through pungent smoke-wreaths, at a girl, her hand over her eyes, who shrank in overmastering terror from a massive form that lay collapsed on the rug before her—Cameron Craig, inert and still, blind and deaf now to sight and sound, the brain empty of scheming, the full cup of his ambition dashed from his lips by the crashing bullet of a slinking house-breaker.

CHAPTER XX

WHAT MATTERED MOST

With that scream Harry's every nerve had become as tense as wire. In his mind's eye he saw her innocency tangled in this hideous web of burglary—perhaps of murder, her name on every lip, her face blazoned in every yellow extra, as the "woman in the case!" The crisis spelled now and he acted with swift instinct.

He snatched the black mask from the floor and adjusted it to his own face, then darted to the safe and jerked open its heavy door. While the retreating servant's alarm still echoed from the hallway of the empty wing, his fingers, with the swiftness of desperation, went searching the papers in the safe. He came almost instantly upon what he sought—a thin packet of letters, tied together with a small photographic plate, ticketed with the name "Beverly Allen."

Echo had shrunk back, was leaning now against the wall, thriving terror of him in her eyes. He came toward her.

"Here!" he said, his voice muffled by the mask. "The letters! Take them and go—go instantly!"

"He has—killed him!" she gasped. "Why do you—"

Harry was sick with apprehension. As in the instant of drowning the smothering intelligence sees pass in vivid review before it the innumerable mosaic of a busy life-time, so he saw, swiftly arrayed in the imminent climax, the perilous hazards by which she was surrounded. Suppose Craig was dead, and she were apprehended, the letters put in evidence, and she told the truth, word for word, as she knew it. If her own estimate of their significance was a correct one, might not the most sinister suspicion then rest upon her? And if, as seemed likely, she was wrong in that surmise—even were the presence of accidental burglars proven—what could explain her presence there, alone in Craig's midnight library? Would it not seem to the great sceptical, sophisticated world only a tale invented to cover the old hackneyed story of a woman's infatuation? Would it not ruin her? He thrust the packet into her shaking hands, seized her arm and dragged her to the hall.

"Quick!" he said, roughly. "The house is roused! Hurry—for heaven's sake!" He thrust her through the outer door. "Down the path to the gate! Go!"

She looked at him a breathless instant. On the floor above them a window was flung open and a shout rang out. Then, drawing a breath that was a sob, she caught the letters to her breast, turned, and fled in an anguish of speed through the misty shrubbery.

In the bluntness of the dilemma Harry's only thought had been to get her away and speedily—then to make his own escape. For he himself stood also in evil case. If Echo's presence there would be difficult to explain, what could be said of his own? To whom, save perhaps the occasional student of aberrant mental phenomena, would the true story of his blind and besotted adventuring seem credible? It came to him instantly now, however, that to insure her safe retreat, he must jeopardise, perhaps fatally, his own. The two house-breakers had no doubt planned their flitting—possibly a handy ladder in some hidden angle of the wall; but the open gate was the only route he knew, and he had sent Echo by this way. For him to follow in her footsteps would draw the damnable hue and cry and double the odds against her. She needed, perhaps, only minutes, but the stir of frightened awakening that sounded through the upper floor told him that for him even seconds might be fatal. Great beads of sweat broke on his forehead.

And what an alternative! He, Harry Sevier, of position and clean honour, to be arrested red-handed, in apparent comradeship with criminals, a partner in a desperate attempt at robbery under arms! To be haled to court, to sit as he had seen men sit so often, under a perilous judgment! For with the logic of the legal mind perilous indeed Harry knew it would be. If Craig lay dead in the room behind him, he would be charged with his murder! A chill ran over him.

As these thoughts rushed through his mind, Harry passed through a crucial episode of his mental life—its first vital and supreme moment. It was not of himself he thought now. It was only of Echo. What became of him mattered little. It was she who mattered most! At whatever risk to himself he must turn the pursuit from her!

A burly man-servant, bareheaded and coatless, came panting from the rear between the trees. Lest he take the path toward the gate, Harry blundered, in his view, across the lighted porch and dashed around the wing, the other giving instant cry. Harry led him on, doubling about the shrubbery. Near at hand the wall reared, hopelessly high and without a break. He skirted a huddle of servants' quarters, rounded the main building and came again to the front. And then, approaching at a double-quick across the lawn, he caught the flash of a bull's-eye. With a wave of thankfulness he realised that the helmeted figure who carried it was coming from the gate. Echo had passed through safely!

Unseen he slipped again into the shadow of the great open door from which he had come. Until that moment he had not realised that he still held in his hand the black mask. There was nothing to do now—his own escape was impossible, but he had saved her!

Suddenly the hall light went up, and with it a brusque voice spoke from the stairway.

"Hands up! I'm covering you. He's here, lads—we've got him cornered. Tell that silly maid to quit screaming and ring up the police."

Harry had lifted his hands above his head. The black mask fell at his feet. "All right," he said.

CHAPTER XXI

CRAIG'S WAY

A half-hour later a surgeon and a nurse had been hurriedly summoned from the hospital, the wounded man had been carried to an upper chamber, and Harry Sevier set in a room across the hall from the library, under guard, hand-cuffs on his wrists. A blue-coated policeman stood grimly at his side, another at the door, and from time to time the white, awed countenance of some servant appeared to stare at him from the threshold and disappear.

His own face, though haggard, was apparently unmoved by the strenuous excitement that hung about the place, yet behind the affected nonchalance his brain was in a turmoil of hope and of dread. In the swift and breathless decision that the event had forced upon him he had not had time to weigh all chances. It had seemed then that the vise must grip either him or Echo, and that the choice lay in his hands. In the moments that followed, however, as he sat moveless in the strident confusion, he had realised that the problem had been by no means so simple, and it had come to him with a pang that Echo's certain safety had lain only in his own escape.

She now believed that she had been extricated from danger by a common thief who, in his rifling of the safe, had seen the letters she pleaded with Craig for, and in the final tragic moment had taken pity on her plight. When she learned that one of those house-breakers had been Harry Sevier, what then? She would never believe him the vulgar criminal! Her imagination would rush to another explanation which would give his presence there a dismal significance. She would conclude that he had somehow discovered the strait in which she conceived her father stood, and in an attempt to retrieve the letters had met Craig's chicanery with technical crime—made use, which to him had seemed justifiable, of cracksmen, and with them had been caught in the emergency whose sudden panic had evoked that shot from the alcove! Whichever way the tragedy turned, it would be infinitely darkened for her by the reflection that it had been her strait which had brought the trouble upon him.

And if murder had been done, and she learned with shrinking heart that he, Harry, stood accused by the law, what then? She knew that his hand had not pulled the trigger, for she had seen the face of the shooter. Her gasping exclamation—"He has—killed him!"—had made that clear to Harry. She would rush to the rescue, forgetful of all else, and with her testimony, bring down the avalanche upon her!

On the heels of these reflections a thrill of hope had come to him. Craig was not yet dead—there had been no sign from above-stairs since the hurried arrival of the surgeon. Also it was anticipated that he would recover consciousness. Harry's knowledge of criminal procedure told him that this was the meaning of his long detention there. Should consciousness come, if merely for an appreciable interval, he would be brought face to face with the wounded man. It was this that all awaited now, and in it Harry discerned the sole possibility of saving the situation.

"Craig must have seen him when he fired!" he told himself. "For the fraction of a second they were face to face. If he is able to make a statement, it will clear me! He will be silent about Echo, too, for he will expect, if he lives, to make her his wife—it will be a long time, probably, before he misses the letters! And if I am disassociated, by Craig himself, from the attack on his life, there will no longer be any question of her involving herself to defend me!" His heart lightened and the great load seemed to lift from his soul. It was the implication of Echo that had made the situation impossible—the unbelievable coincidence of their joint presence—in damnable propinquity with the shooting. With Echo eliminated and he himself free from that cowardly indictment, would not all yet be well? He was well enough known. He was no sordid house-breaker—in spite of the humiliating incident of his entrance there that night!

His thought broke, as a spruce young man, with the air of authority which is the perquisite and prerequisite of the private-secretary, entered and whispered with the guardian at the door.

Harry's heart seemed to stop beating. "Is he—dead?" he asked.

The young man looked at him coldly. "Not yet."

"Will he live?"

There was a longer pause before the other replied: "It's too soon to tell yet. It's up to you to hope so, I imagine."

He whispered again with the officer, then crossed the hall to the library, which he entered, closing the door behind him.

When the secretary reappeared he went quickly up the stair and along a hall. There he tapped on a door and opened it.

The room disclosed was the one in which Craig lay. At one side was a small table covered with a white cloth, with a mêlée of nickelled instruments, rolls of absorbent bandaging and a basin of reddened liquid. The air was full of the sickish-sweet halitus of some drug. Craig's head on the pillow was wound with the white swathing and the nurse stood beside the bed. The doctor came forward, and the secretary spoke to him in an undertone.

All at once Craig opened his eyes. He looked acutely at the faces so near him, the cloth-covered table with its instruments, the white-capped nurse.

"I—know," he said. He tried to lift a hand to his bandaged head. "How—bad?"

The doctor laid a professional hand on the one that strayed across the coverlet. "We want to pull you through, Mr. Craig," he said with soothing assurance, "and you must help us by wiping every anxiety from your mind. Only a dozen words with your secretary here, to help you stop even thinking, and then you are going to sleep."

The young man came to the bed-side. "It was an attempted burglary, as you probably realised, sir. Two men were hidden in the library and you were shot when they tried to get away. One of them has been caught. The servants say a lady was with you at the time and the police want to know who she was."

Craig did not reply immediately. Echo had slipped away in the confusion! Well, so much the better. Her presence could not have helped. It was no more to his interest than to hers—since she was to be his wife—that the story of her midnight call should be bruited abroad. "I—don't know—her," he said.

"I'll tell them so," said the secretary. "The safe had been opened, but its contents are practically intact. I have checked up all the papers on the list and there seems to be only one thing missing. Perhaps you took that out yourself. It is the last item on the list—a package of letters."

A quick gleam crossed the white face on the pillow. "Gone? No—no. Impossible. They were—of no—value to—any one but me."

"You may have put them in your desk," said the other. He turned to the surgeon. "The police want to bring up the man for identification."

The man of medicines frowned. "I suppose it has to be," he said. "Tell them to do so quickly. Only a word," he warned the wounded man.

A moment or two later the secretary tapped again at the door and it opened upon the two policemen. Harry walked between, the chain on his wrists clinking lightly as he stepped. One of them came forward to the foot of the great bed.

"You saw the man who shot you, Mr. Craig?"

"Yes."

He beckoned and Harry and his guardian moved forward into range of vision.

"You solemnly swear that what you shall say is the truth?"

"Yes."

"Is this the one?"

Craig stared—a look of negation that made Harry's heart leap. It was a look also that held no recognition, and in that instant, for the first time since that night's harrowing series of events had begun, Harry remembered that he stood in strange guise, in unaccustomed clothes and with smooth-shaven chin.

But into the eyes that gazed from the pillow recognition speedily came—recognition strangely commingled of incredulity, amaze, distempered suspicion, leaping swiftly to a slow, deadly certainty. A lurid sequence was running across the fevered mind that the man confronting him could not read:

Harry Sevier sculking there and disguised—one of the burglars! The missing letters—Echo had gone with them! It had been a cunning, hypocritical plot, then, with a hired safe-robber and thug—and they had tricked and baffled him. Craig gasped. His eyes suffused with blood. He had said that he had not known the woman. Yet he could still score! Living or dying, he could drag down Harry Sevier to a black depth from which he should never rise again!

He laughed, a harsh jarring laugh. His face became convulsed. He tried to lift himself on an elbow. The nurse thrust her strong arms beneath the pillow and raised him. He pointed his finger at Harry.

"Yes!" he said in a crackling whisper. "He is the man who—did it! He—shot me!"

"Do you know him?" The officer spoke clearly, leaning forward.

"Yes. I—he is—"

But that was all. With a final vain effort, his head fell back on the pillow. That last flare of rage, of revengeful hatred, had exhausted the sick vitality, and he was gone into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER XXII

HARRY DECIDES

The steel handcuff bit more hardly into Harry's wrist, but he did not feel it. His eyes were fixed and his face had grown grey. The accusation, with all its shuddering implications, had surged over him like the assurance of the unescapable end, the last engulfing wave of hopeless finality which, in its subsidence, left him cold and still. Malice and hatred had closed the door of hope.

His sacrifice had gone for nothing. He could not save Echo. The matter had been taken from his hands. She must be involved. If murder had been done, her passionate denial in his defence would no doubt suffice to save him—he knew his southern juries!—but at what a price to her would be his salvation! For though sufficient doubt would be insinuated to legally acquit him, in the eyes of their world harrowing suspicions must always cling to her. Collusion between her and himself, her lover, to secure compromising letters, a guilty understanding embracing possible murder! A midnight rendezvous with one lover, converted into swift tragedy by the vengeful pursuit of the other! So the speculations would run, and the baleful whispers would follow her all her life. What matter though she married him? Would love make up for that?

It was the Harry Sevier of remorseless logic, of clear thinking and rigid analysis, who reasoned now.

A tall old clock stood at the turn of the echoing stair and as he descended between his two uniformed attendants, grimly watchful of his every movement, he noted mechanically that it was two o'clock. It came to him with a chill and awed amazement how much might happen within one round of the clock. When those hands had last pointed to two o'clock he had stood in his office, a man of reputation and newly-ordered life, with all his heart beating to love; now he was disgraced, the woman he loved about to know the shame and hideous notoriety of scandal, both of them to be pilloried together as principals in another of those horrifying revelations of double-life which at periodic intervals shock a community's decorum!

It was not for himself he was thinking first. His pain for Echo swallowed up his own. As he sat in the cab between his guardians, bound for the station-house and the police interrogatory that should fling abroad its sensation in the morning's papers, his composure crumbled. He bent and put his cold face in his colder hands. His lips moved voicelessly.

"Echo ... Echo!" he whispered. "You have had my love, you have it now. You could have my life, if I could give it—every day, every drop of my blood, would not be enough to pay the price of what you must bear! But it is out of my power. I thought I could save you, my darling! But I can't.... I can't.... If I might only suffer alone, and you never know!"

He lifted his head with a start. A thought had darted to his mind like an impinging ray of light. Why should she ever know? Why should any one know—if Craig died? Only Craig who had known him in the past, had recognised him as Harry Sevier. Perhaps that was the greatest risk he should have to run. He could take refuge in silence, tell nothing, explain nothing. She would not know that the real shooter had not been taken. Could he maintain under the searching purview of the law that anonymity which he had sought to insure during the debauch into which he had so avidly plunged yesterday afternoon? Why not? He had so adjusted his home affairs, luckily, that a long time—perhaps many months—would elapse before his absence would be narrowly questioned. He was now in a city where he was not known: hundreds of miles of steel rails lay between him and the crowds to whom he was a familiar figure. His dark beard—so distinguishing a feature—was gone. He had discarded the characteristic gold-rimmed eye-glasses. Not an article of clothing he wore bore his name. His present face might be flung on printed pages to the four winds, and who, even of those who had seen him day in and day out, would say, "It is Harry Sevier!"

There were but two contingencies. If Craig recovered sufficient consciousness to speak the name that had fainted on his lips when they two had been face to face in that room of hurried surgery—then his incognito would fall and fate must have its way. If Craig died without recovering consciousness—this, provided his own identity was not discovered, was the one way out for Echo.

For him it meant, probably, the last risk. He had now to meet no mere assumption of guilt, but an accusation, direct and unqualified, made under oath, in what might well be the hour of death. He could not offer in rebuttal evidence of character, reputation and standing. He was deliberately refusing to call his only witness to the fact. Yet he did not waver. The Harry Sevier who under the stress of impulse had acted so swiftly to save the woman he loved, elected the same choice now.

He would do it. Whatever the risk, whatever the ultimate cost to him, he would do it!

CHAPTER XXIII

THE BROKEN PICTURE

"Hyuh yo' is, honey, smack-dab on time!" called 'Lige's cheery voice, as he took Echo's bag. "Yo' fo'got ter say which train yo' comin' back on yistiddy, so ah ben waitin' wid dee cya'age fo dee las' fo'. Ah was figuratin' on yo' gittin' hyuh fo' dinnah, sho'."

As they bowled along toward home Echo wondered if she could really be the same girl who had driven away the day before along those self-same streets! The strenuous events through which she had passed seemed the terrifying creation of a dream, a nightmarish panorama of the sick imagination, so wild and incredible all appeared in the serene light of this day: The painful scene in Craig's library that had ended in swift tragedy, with the apparition between the portières of that baleful face—with its narrow eyes and upthrust of nondescript hair it had stamped itself ineffacably upon her memory!—the deafening shot and the after confusion—those breathless moments when she had run along the wet path, with a sense of flashing lights and alarm behind her—her safe emergence into the demure street, where she dared not run, compelling herself to walk albeit ready to faint with fear at sight of a patrolling policeman—the ghastly delay in the stuffy waiting-room of the station where she had checked her bag on arrival—the suffocating relief when at last the express pulled out, bearing her away unchallenged.

Through the long night she had tossed feverishly in her berth, without undressing, at intervals feeling the meaning of the catastrophe in which she had figured surge over her in a flood. That catastrophe itself had saved her from one horror: but for it she would now be the wife of Cameron Craig—a thought that made her shiver. Now she was safe! In all that trip, fortunately, she had encountered no one she knew. She had seen but one servant at the house and in his presence had worn a light veil. Only Craig had known who she was! What if she had been taken—held as a witness? How could she have explained her presence except by the letters for whose suppression she had been ready to give her life's happiness? As in imagination she saw her father and herself pictured in the yellow press, the centre of gossip and humiliating notoriety, she hugged the letters to her breast with intensest gratitude toward the desperado who had extricated her from the instant crisis. With what swift self-possession he had acted for her safety! That in that lightning-like emergency he should have even thought of the letters filled her with astonishment. Over and over again she tried to picture his face behind the mask, as his hand had held out the packet to her. Her senses had been shocked keenly alive at the moment: she had even noted—as in tense crises one notes inconsequent trifles—the ring on his finger with its curious, square green stone. A thousand times she lost herself in wonder that a man capable of such a deed to an unknown woman could yet be a common burglar, one of the desperate gang whose leader was now awaiting trial, and whose malignant face and levelled pistol haunted her. Then the shuddering thought would roll over her that she, Echo Allen, had witnessed the awful act of murder, and she would hide her face in her pillow, trembling and spent. Dawn had long been whitening the windows when the strained nerves relaxed and the body, fatigued by two sleepless nights, found fitful rest.

The sun had been high when she awoke and by the time she had made her toilette and drunk a cup of coffee she had reached the little station for which she had ostensibly started the preceding day. A rambling hack had taken her to the home of her aunt—a recluse who had for a dozen years regarded the outer world through the blurred medium of semi-invalidism, absorbed in her languid reading and her flowers. On arrival Echo had found the frail figure lying out among her roses, with white, wild butterflies flaunting about her, stronger than she had been for months past, and free from the querulous humours which generally held her. So keen was her delight in her betterment that Echo had found it easy to accomplish her own departure after luncheon, though she generally stayed the night. There was for the present, therefore, no added absence to be accounted for, and the lapse of time might never have to be explained.

As she drove now from the station through the bustling, down-town streets toward Midfields, the knowledge that her father's secret was safe overshadowed all the pain through which she had passed. The dreadful memory dulled in the sunshine and the sense of security buoyed her. She would never have to tell her part in that terrible night to any one. Not even to Harry: she could tell him that she had never loved any one but him: that it had been misunderstanding that had driven her to send him that unhappy note. Her father himself need never be made aware that she knew his secret. It would be forever dead and buried!

She bade 'Lige stop at the post-office. At her aunt's she had wrapped the letters in thick wrapping-paper and sealed and tied the packet, and this she now addressed to her father, printing the words in a large, round hand. Then she bought some stamps, affixed them at one of the desks that lined the corridor and smudged them with ink to simulate a postmark. Once at home it would be easy to slip the parcel among his evening mail. He would believe that Craig had relented of his purpose, would destroy the letters, and the danger would be gone forever!

Lastly, standing in the thronging thoroughfare, at the same dusty little desk, on a sheet of paper which she bought at the stamp-window, she wrote to Harry Sevier:

Forget the note I sent you yesterday. Count that it was never written, that everything—everything!—is as it was when we sat on the porch together the day before. I can't write the rest—but come to me to-night, and I will tell you.
ECHO.

She sealed and addressed this—as an afterthought, marking it urgent—and went out to the carriage. A few minutes later the horses drew up again, this time before the populous office-building that held Harry's offices.

She climbed the stair slowly, her heart hammering. She intended to hand the note to his clerk. If Harry had gone home, it would be sent to him there. On the landing she stopped, her breath coming quickly. The mahogany door was open and she could see a little way into the outer office. If she came face to face with him, what should she say?

But no sound of voices, no rustle of paper or scratch of pen, came to her. She went nearer—the place was empty. She took a hesitant step or two into the room. The door of the inner office was open—that was empty too, and its big desk closed. Harry was not there, but the clerk, at least, should not be far off, as the door had stood wide. She went closer and peered into the inner office. Facing her from the wall was a small cabinet, its door, from which splinters of opaque glass were scattered about the rugs, smashed through as if by a heavy blow. Beneath it, on the desk-top, was a black bottle and a stained glass, tipped on its side.

All at once she started. She had caught sight of something that lay in the fire-place. She went and picked it up: it was a picture of herself—one she had never known Harry possessed—a photograph of her portrait that had been hung in a certain spring salon in Paris. It had been framed in silver, but frame and picture had been broken across, savagely torn and twisted into a remnant of metal and cardboard.

She dropped the defaced thing with a little cry and caught a hand to her breast. What must he have been thinking in that moment of ruthless destruction? It had been after he had read her note to him! Her cheeks flamed. Did he now despise her for what he had thought her flippancy, or hate her for having taken his love only to throw it away like an old glove? As she looked again at the riven cabinet and the bottle on the desk, a shiver of dread seized her. From the silent symbols there stood forth outlines that frightened her.

She went slowly out to the hall, the letter she had intended to leave crushed up in her hand. At the top of the stair stood a tall window and she halted in its embrasure and leaned against the sill, hearing dully the muffled clack of the street and trying to see a mental way through the confusing conjectures that were leaping, like lurking beasts of prey, upon her. As she stood there voices sounded behind her, coming from the other end of the hall—the clerk was returning with a comrade:

"'No,' says he. 'Don't know when I'll come back.' Thought he looked a bit off coloured, too. Told me to close up the office till I heard from him, and not to forward anything. Rum go, eh?"

"Seems like mighty poor business," ventured the other.

The clerk sniffed. "Business!" he exclaimed. "Much Sevier cares about that! A man with a brain like his and a silver tongue to boot doesn't need business! But after that speech of his the other day I should think he'd sit tight as wax to those Civic Club people. They're going to make a real campaign of it and he could get on the ticket sure. It'd be a cinch! Why he wants to light out abroad somewhere beats me! Well, I don't care how long he stays. I'm going to shut up the shebang to-night and put in some good licks for my law-examination."

They entered the office and the door closed upon their voices.

Echo stood motionless, looking down into the street. Harry had gone away! He had gone with despair and anger, or worse than anger, against her in his heart leaving behind him only that mangled portrait and that ominous bottle on the desk! Where had he gone, and when should she see him again?

Just across the way a knot of people was gathering in front of a newspaper bulletin-board whereon a great white sheet was being pasted, and her gaze—first mechanically, then with a start of shrinking comprehension—read the staring headlines that had been roughly lettered upon it:

CAMERON CRAIG SHOT DOWN BY BURGLAR

DESPERATE MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTER IN FINANCIER'S LIBRARY

WOUNDED MAN UNCONSCIOUS BUT STILL ALIVE

MYSTERIOUS WOMAN INVOLVED

Cameron Craig was not dead! If he lived, he must one day learn that the letters were gone from the safe. Would he not then connect her with their disappearance? What would he do? She was aware, unhappily, to what lengths he was capable of going! Even though the letters were not his, would he accuse her of stealing them—her?

As she drove away the last two lines seemed to imprint themselves on her eyeballs in monstrous symbols of flame.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WOMAN WHO KNEW

June came with its gold-born days, its passionate bird-songs and scents of roses, its shimmer of willow and pine and burnished lustre of down-bent holly-leaves and its evening mists wreathing the tall garden shrubs like wedding-veils. But the beauty and passion of the throbbing season came to Echo with a sense of mockery.

The night of her return she had carried out her plan as regarded the letters and her father had believed the package had arrived with his mail. When a little later he had told her that Cameron Craig had sent him the letter whose publication had been threatened, years had seemed fallen from his shoulders. She had been content that he should deem the act significant of the other's better nature emerging from the slough of an ignoble temptation—satisfied to know that in his mind the fact that it should have been one of the last acts Craig had performed before the tragedy, had invested it with a quality of the fateful and foreordained. Her own thought was absorbed with other things.

She had read avidly, though with unspeakable dread and loathing, the newspaper accounts of the affair. The refusal of the arrested man to tell his name or where he came from, or to explain in the slightest detail—except brazenly to deny any part in it—the crime which had set the city in which it had occurred agog, had been duly chronicled; but the condition of the victim—since Cameron Craig was a power in the community—had absorbed a greater part of the popular interest, and the daily bulletins of his physicians had called forth far more comment than the unknown criminal whom he had identified as the man who had shot him. She had felt a great relief, also, in the knowledge that Craig had declared that he had not known his feminine visitor; and while the dread had inevitably lifted that when he discovered the loss of the letters he might betray her, it had faded at length in the certainty that, though he lived, the brain-injury had left him with clouded consciousness. Day after day he had lain voiceless, the outer injury gradually and surely yielding to the medicaments of healing, but the brain lapsed into a semblance of vacuity, inert and unresponsive, a mild phantom of the old Craig, the bodily functions become mere mechanism, the mind blank and fallow, its inner hurt waiting a diagnosis beyond the skill of local practitioners.

But though the secret Echo carried shut within her breast thus grew less painful with the passage of time, another dread was slowly drawing out of her heart its warmth and glow. This was the deeper hurt of Harry Sevier's absence.

Going about her daily affairs she thought of him without ceasing. She never drove through the streets that her gaze did not search the busy pavements—never passed the building that held his office that her eyes did not lift fearfully to its blank and blinded windows—never heard the postman's brisk step on the porch that her heart did not beat chokingly. Where had he gone? Chilly knew of no one who had received a letter from him. Aunt Judy, his cook, was as ignorant as she. She had even interviewed Suzuki, but it had been plain that the Japanese could tell nothing.

The recollection of the bottle and the overturned glass she had seen in his office recurred to her again and again, with all their bitter suggestions of surrender, relapse and demoralisation. Could it be that he had thrown away his hard-earned victory, hurled himself again into the pit from which he had so painfully climbed, which now might hold him forever? And coupled with this sickening thought came the reflection: what if Harry should die, far away somewhere, perhaps in some foreign country, without seeing her again, without ever knowing? There were hours, too, when, woman-like, she wondered whether he had cared so much: whether he had not found comfort in absence and given his love elsewhere.

Her cheeks grew paler day by day, and in spite of herself her step lagged and lassitude grew upon her. Often she felt her father's anxious look and knew that her mother, in her stately and undemonstrative way was deeply disturbed. She took without protest the tonics Doctor Southall prescribed, but they brought little betterment, and, as physicians will, he at length began to talk of a sea-trip. In her growing apathy plans of this sort meant nothing to Echo, but she believed Harry had gone abroad, and the chance that they might meet, however slender it might be, called to her. When Mrs. Spottiswoode, therefore, announced her annual migration to Paris for her winter's wardrobe, it was arranged that Echo should make the voyage under her chaperonage.

Meanwhile the date had arrived for Echo's usual summer's visit to Nancy Langham in the neighbouring capital. Ordinarily a stay at the home of the girl of whom she was so fond, would have been something to look forward to with unmixed delight. Now, however, it had become a thing to shrink from. To walk those streets—perhaps to see again the house whose very memory had been such an anguish to her—she would gladly have evaded this. But when Nancy's letters promised to pass from pleading to epistolary tears, she at length yielded and late August found her the Langhams' guest for a final weekend.

As she dressed, on the afternoon of her arrival, there was a tap at the door and Nancy's voice said, "May I come in, dear? I want to see what you are going to wear."

"Yes, come in. I'm almost ready."

Echo had chosen a gown of black tulle with a gold rose at the brocaded girdle and Nancy looked at her admiringly. "Gracious!" she exclaimed. "That black—it positively sets your hair on fire! It makes you so pale, though. Do put a little dab of pink on your cheeks, Echo; you make me look positively lurid beside you!"

There was some truth in the comparison, for the younger girl was like a wild-rose, quivering with life and colour. She took the hare's-foot and came to Echo coaxingly. "Just a little tinge ... like that. There! Now you are just perfect."

"Who's coming to tea, Nancy?"

"Oh, only a handful—Mrs. Moncure. You met her last year—and Mr. Meredith: he's the District Attorney—and the Shirley boys: they're very young and College-y—and five or six others. I only asked a few."

The Shirleys were first to appear and were followed by Mrs. Moncure, a mellow, winy woman with a white gown that smacked of the Rue de la Paix, and a complexion exquisitely made up. She greeted Nancy with a smiling graciousness, nodded to the gentlemen, and sat down on the sofa beside Echo.

"It was so sweet of Nancy to ask me to come," she said. "I've never had half a chance to chat with you before, though we met last year at a particularly stupid reception or something. This is so much more home-y, isn't it?" She dropped into smalltalk, rippling and charming, while Nancy poured the tea, and when Mr. Meredith presently arrived she presented him.

"Our District Attorney," she announced. "The Terror of the Lawless!"

"Now don't tell me I look a terror!" said he, beseechingly to Echo. "I'm a most mild-mannered man in private life, am I not, Mrs. Moncure?"

"I'm not sure yet whether I can give you a character," she answered. "I haven't seen this year's subscription-list to my pet charity."

"Blackmail!" the other asserted indignantly. "I'll subpoena you all as witnesses. And this is how I am treated for protecting you from criminality!"

"I like that!" exclaimed Nancy wickedly. "When burglars hide in our alcoves and jump out and shoot us when we're not looking! Poor Mr. Craig! I think you ought to be impeached, or impounded, or whatever they call it."

He laughed. "You know of the Craig affair, of course, Miss Allen," he said, turning.

Echo was glad for the touch of rouge on her cheeks. "Yes," she answered. "Oh, yes." Her gaze was on the basket of tulips on the tea-table, but she was really seeing Craig's smouldering black eyes—the lowering brows—the ruthless clamped lips—as she had seen his face in that moment of revealment in his study.

"The trial of the man who shot him opened to-day," continued Meredith. He looked again at Nancy. "It's up to the police to prevent burglaries, you see. My part comes after the burglars are caught. I point the moral—as a deterrent to others still at large."

"I hope, then," said Mrs. Moncure, "that the moral will be well pointed in this case. I didn't sleep for a week after it happened."

"I shall certainly try to get him the limit," declared the attorney. "It'll be a long time before you need fear another midnight call from him, Miss Langham. While you are at the matinée to-morrow, please remember that I am vociferating frantically at the jury in your behalf. I surely deserve a cup of tea for that, don't I?"

"Well, on consideration, perhaps you do," asserted Nancy judicially, as she poured. "I'll relent."

She sat smiling, her dainty hand on the old silver urn, not observing how the smile had been stricken from Echo's face. Meredith noted the latter's strained look, however, and said, as he seated himself, "You mustn't think we are prone to such melodramatics. We don't have them often. This case is somewhat peculiar from the fact that the police can't identify the man we are trying. We don't know who he is or what is his record. For of course he has one."

"But," interposed Mrs. Moncure, "I thought criminals were always photographed—don't they call it the 'Rogues' Gallery'?—and measured, so they could be identified."

"My dear lady," he replied, "for two years I've been trying to bring this city up to date in that very thing. The state has the Bertillon system, but it's in use only in the penitentiary, as a permanent record. The data, however, should be taken when a criminal is arrested, and there ought to be a system of exchange of these records with all penal institutions. There would be no temptation then to turn a bare-faced burglary, coupled with felonious assault, into a romantic mystery, as this man's counsel, my friend, Mason, judging from the line he took to-day, will try to do."

There was a pause, as he possessed himself of another scone.

"I wonder," said Mrs. Moncure, presently, "if we shall ever know who she was—the woman who was with Craig when he was shot."

Meredith laughed a little. "I imagine it's not likely," he returned. "He has declared once that he didn't know her, and we can all understand her own passionate reticence on the subject!"

Mrs. Moncure smiled as she rose.

"Oh Sin! Oh Sorrow! and Oh Womankind! (she quoted)
How can you do such things and keep your fame,
Unless this world, and t'other too, be blind?
Nothing so dear as an unfilched good name!"

For Echo the smiling words were barbed and winged with a painful significance. Again and again, as she chatted mechanically over the tea-cups, they came back to her, coupled with the memory of the stories she had heard of Craig—the whispered allusions made with shrugs and lifted eye-brows.

As she lay in bed that night, she felt her hot cheeks flush through the darkness. Could the world think that of her—if it knew?

CHAPTER XXV

ON TRIAL

The painful suggestions that had come to Echo over the teacups possessed her next day, when she drove with Nancy in the morning and in the afternoon, alone, selected her final steamer purchases—for she had made her farewells at home and was to go next day directly to New York, meeting Mrs. Spottiswoode on board the steamer. She was restless and uneasy and the thought of the trial proceeding at the court-house that day obsessed her. Here she was, she, Echo Allen, save for the escaped marauders themselves, the only one who had witnessed the deed whose imagined details the law was now laboriously reconstructing only a block away.

The thought brought a burning self-consciousness which began to be threaded by a fearful curiosity. She was feeling the repellent fascination that the scene of a hazardous episode ever after possesses for the secret actor in it.

Instinctively the lode-stone had drawn her steps to Court House Square. She looked across at the broad, open doorway. Why not go in? She had attended trials at home. She could find a place in the rear where she would be unobserved. For an instant the thought crossed her mind that the prisoner might recognise her, but then she remembered that on that night at Craig's house she had worn a light veil.

She crossed the square quickly, and with sudden decision went up the steps and into the building. An usher sat on a stool by a door that stood ajar and before she knew it he had pushed it open and she found herself in the court-room.

In that room, unguessed by all who had watched and listened during the dragging trial that was now rushing swiftly to end, weird forces had been contending. In touch with the old, familiar things, but with a high-coloured unnaturalness, Harry Sevier had stood ceaseless guard over his secret, every sense and instinct on the qui vive to minimise the chances of recognition.

The night of his arrest, as he lay sleepless in his police-cell, he had thought out certain obvious details of the game he intended to play and had lost no time in putting them into practice. He had worn his waving hair, rather long; during his detention he reversed this habit and instead of its customary parting, brushed it straight back from his forehead. Later he took stock of personal mannerisms and altered by unrelaxing watchfulness and determination the natural register of his voice. Always his mind had retained the sense of fate that had come to him when he sat in the alcove with Paddy the Brick's pistol clapped to his temple. Drink had driven him to that strange journey that had ended in tragedy, but had it not been, nevertheless, some over-ruling design that had brought him to Craig's house, where the unbelievable accident of his presence had saved Echo? But for that, she would now be Craig's wife, or the centre of a wretched scandal. If he held his course, and played his cards as they fell, perhaps fate would guide him still! So far the gipsy ring had brought him luck, he thought whimsically, and he had kept it on his finger.

But withal, it had been a straining interval. There had been, first, the fear that Craig would die, casting its grisly shadow across the floor; and this had woven with the dread, that never lessened, of the moment when he should recover consciousness. The first morning's newspapers had made a feature of Craig's assertion that he did not know the woman who had awaited his coming in his library; but Harry held in his mind the certainty that his own recognition must inevitably result in Echo's involvement.

He had adopted his course of silence because it was the only one open to him at the moment, but the event had justified his choice. It was the unexpected that had happened. The time-limit of the law which bounds murder had passed, and Craig was still alive. Nor had he recovered consciousness. But even with these assurances, Harry had had hourly to fight with the dread of some accidental confrontation which should pierce the screen and this dread had infinitely increased with the opening of the trial, when he became perforce the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes.

But here also fate had been kind. It was now the second day of the proceedings, for Harry's personal qualities, no less than his strange pertinacity, had roused a keen professional interest in the attorney who had been assigned to defend him, and the latter had made a fight which his client, whose legal experience judged the outcome certain, would gladly have exchanged for the inept blunderings of the veriest tyro.

However, no chance encounter had betrayed him and as the District Attorney rose for his final clinching of the nail of evidence, Harry had felt a great relief that the ordeal was so nearly finished.

Almost the great danger was past! With his conviction and the passing of sentence upon him, the Judicial arm of the law would have delivered him to the Executive. Danger of publicity would be over, and Echo might be told the truth, without danger of recoil upon herself. A thousand times in his cell he had wondered how he should accomplish this. In some way it could be brought about—some safe and secret way—just how he would have leisure to decide. No one, not even Mason, his counsel, need be trusted with the significant secret that had such power to blast. She must be well instructed so that no false step could mar his plan. She must take no one into her confidence—must tell her story privately to the Governor, who had known her from her childhood. He was a just and discreet man and Harry did not doubt the outcome. His own story could supplement hers, and after a sufficient interval, executive pardon would quietly release him. He could step back into his old niche, and all would be as before. Even if Craig recovered, he would be powerless, since an accusation could not lie against a pardoned man, and Craig would not bring a charge that was at once bootless and incredible. Nor would he wreak an empty revenge upon Echo. He had once declared that he had not known the woman in the library, and, since she was lost to him in any case, he would not hazard a public reversal of his testimony that all would unite to call dastardly. The one thing Craig valued which men in the mass could give him, aside from power and money, was his place in the social sun, and he would not risk this. In the publication of the letter, or letters, that would have involved her father, he doubtless would not have been publicly known; in this matter he would run the gauntlet of popular southern opinion and would be well aware that the act would damn him. So Harry told himself. The real story would be buried, and the world—his world and Echo's—would never know!

Thus he was thinking as he listened dully to the prosecutor's scathing résumé. His elbow was on the long table by which he sat, his brow in his hand, shielding his eyes from the sunlight that sent darting arrows across the cool, dim room as the windowshade waved in the light breeze. He could not see the door at the rear of the room swing open, nor the figure of the woman who entered—to pause, momentarily confused in the quick transition from the sunny Square to the shadow of the interior.

Echo's heart was beating hard as she slipped into a vacant seat next the aisle, conscious that the man who was speaking was Meredith, whom she had met at tea the day before, and that he was closing his final speech for the prosecution. She looked about her, at the jury who seemed apathetic and a trifle bored, at the Judge who was writing perfunctorily on the pad before him, and then her gaze slipped, half-stealthily, to the long table before the bar, where the prisoner should be sitting. But though she leaned forward to look, she could not see him for the intervening figures. Then, suddenly, the deliberate, judicial utterance of the District Attorney caught her attention. He was rounding to a final period and the meaning of what he was saying smote through her self-command to the last, inner corner of her shrinking consciousness and made the room whirl about her:

"The counsel for the defence has attempted to read a romantic meaning into the obduracy with which this thief and would-be murderer has held to his policy of silence. He has invited you to believe that this silence indicates a noble desire to shield a woman's reputation. The name of a woman who thrusts herself, unexpected and unattended, into a man's house at dead of night! The name of a woman the innocence of whose errand is effectually denied by her precipitate flight and her craven hiding!"

Echo sank back into her seat, breathless. She listened to the brief, conventional charge, saw the jurors file out, heard the stir and movement of relaxation sweep over the room, yet she was unconscious of the lapse of time. The public, open declaration had seemed to set the final flaming seal upon the incident, voicing, as if with a monster siren, the shameful meaning! She had cringed at Mrs. Moncure's smiling innuendo; now the scathing indictment was burning itself on her brain. "A woman who thrusts herself unexpected and unattended into a man's house at dead of night!"—the words seemed to stab her over and over like poisoned daggers. She was that—that woman! She imagined herself rising in that suffocating room and saying distinctly, "It is I he said that of—I, Echo Allen!" She saw herself on the witness-stand, heckled and badgered, faltering an unbelievable story to sceptical ears. There was rolling over her an overwhelming dread, and her hands had clenched till the nails struck purple crescents into her palms.

She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.

"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"—the clerk's metallic admonition seemed to come from far away. She strove to look now, but a swimming dizziness was upon her and the shadows of the room were turning black. She had never fainted in her life, and the thought of fainting now filled her with terror. She rose to her feet, fighting back the sickness with all her strength, stepped into the aisle, and in a moment more the fresh outer air, sweet and reviving, struck her quivering face.

Her going had made no stir, had been unnoted, perhaps, by a dozen in the court-room. She could not guess that in the instant she had risen, with blank eyes and unsteady feet, the prisoner at the bar had half-turned and for a breath his gaze had fastened upon her face.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW

But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart beating as if it must burst, as the deliberate judicial accents struck across the courtroom:

"I have no desire to say anything to add to your anxiety of mind. The rulings of the court, if they have had any bias, have not leaned to the side of the Commonwealth. There is no legal right that has not been afforded you and if you have not chosen to meet the evidence with candour it is to be presumed that it is because candour could have lent no degree of mitigation to the circumstances. The jury has found you guilty as charged, and I should be doing less than my duty, if I allowed sympathy based upon imagined facts to subtract from the full legal penalty. The judgment of this court is, therefore, that you be imprisoned in the state's penitentiary during a period of twenty years."

Harry hardly heard the pronouncement for the mental confusion that held him. Echo knew! All the time while he had been fighting back recognition, she had known! How had she guessed? Had his voice, perhaps, that night when he had saved her, betrayed him? He remembered her white and agonised look when he had thrust her from the door of Craig's house and bade her run. A doubt, coupled with his absence from home, would have driven her, somehow or other, to discover the truth. She had been near him often, perhaps, realising the situation, conscious of what he had been striving for, knowing that only silence for a time could save them both! In that instant's view he had seen the look of suffering and sickness in her face. In these long weeks—if, indeed, she had known it so long—what an anguish of anxiety she must have been enduring!

As the voice ceased and he sat down, through the warm wave that was coursing over him, Harry felt a chilling realisation of the risk she had run in coming there. An impulsive word, an indiscreet look, and suspicion might have been roused leading to discovery. Sitting before this bar he was only an unknown criminal, a submerged "John Doe" on whom the make-shift expediency of the law spent itself. But the veil once lifted, he would be Harry Sevier, club-man and lawyer whose pleading folk had once flocked to hear, now caught in the vise of the law and proven thief and degenerate.

In the emptying room he felt the cool hand of his counsel touch his own, and followed him—with a watchful deputy-sheriff now in hand-reach—to a side door that opened into a chamber at the rear of the court-room. On the threshold the lawyer turned to the sheriff.

"There's no hurry, Jerry," he said peevishly. "You wait out here a few minutes. The old man himself is coming. He wants to see him."

"Mr. Mason," said Sevier as the other closed the door. "I shall not pretend to thank you for your interest and kindness."

The man of briefs shrugged his shoulders. "There's nothing to thank me for," he answered briskly. "Now, if I had cleared you—"

Harry nodded. "Naturally, you couldn't do that. You were at a disadvantage."

"Thanks to you!"

"Yes, I didn't assist you much, I know."

"Didn't help me at all," came back in a growl.

"No doubt you think I might have," said Harry. "But please don't count me unresponsive. It is only that the logic of the situation appealed to me as unanswerable. But it is a privilege," he added, with the glimmer of a smile, "to have been associated with you."

Mason looked at him with a twist to his saturnine lips. "You have been my most remarkable client," he said. "It would have pleased me to have gotten you off. But unluckily for you, I'm no Harry Sevier."

It was fortunate that the face of the man beside him was turned away, or he might have seen it go white and startled. "I'm sure I lost no chance I might have had," said the other slowly, "even though you're not Harry Sevier, whoever he is."

The other laughed shortly. "He's a lawyer in the next state. I heard him plead once. He didn't bother with evidence! He'd clear Judas Iscariot with that silver tongue of his! Ah, well..." He shrugged his shoulders again, and turned to a closed door. "I'll see if the old man is ready."

"One moment." Harry had drawn the ring with the square uncut emerald from his finger, and now he held it out. "I should consider it a favour, if you would take this—it has no particular value, I am sorry to say—as a little remembrance."

Mason turned the ring over in his hands. Under the churlish pose a guilty flush stole up his lean, eccentric face that betrayed unmistakably the friendliness and liking he had learned for the man whose plight angered and whose attitude puzzled him. "Thank you!" he said, and a sudden smile made the grim demeanour all at once soft and human. He slipped it on his finger. "Thank you! I shall be proud to keep it."

He opened the door and Sevier followed him into the room adjoining.

There, looking out of the window, the fingers of one thin hand in his plenteous blue-grey beard, the other behind him, stood the Governor of the State. Harry felt a thrill run through him. He knew the older man by sight, for they had met once casually in the past. Had Echo already spoken? Did the other know?

"Governor," said the lawyer, "I beg to present my client, whose cause I have so poorly represented."

In the deep grey, kindly eyes that were studying him attentively, Harry saw instantly, however, that there was no hidden knowledge, and his heart, that had leaped quickly, dropped into measured beating. He bowed.

"My counsel did wonders," he said, "but the day of miracles is past."

The reply was simple enough, but the visitor unconsciously looked his surprise. He had been prepared for something in a way unusual, for Mason had employed his intimacy to inspire something of his own keen interest in his client. Face to face with the latter, the Governor understood the lawyer's puzzlement. Here was a man who had been arrested as a house-breaker and who, caught in the very act, had shot a man down. Yet he found it suddenly credible, as Mason had declared, that the man was no ordinary burglar, was indeed, or had been, a gentleman. But there were gentlemen-thieves! He met Harry's tone with noncommittal courtesy.

"You will not consider this an intrusion, I hope," he said. "My friend here was anxious that I should see you. He has been deeply concerned in your case."

"It is a pleasure," Harry replied simply. "He has been put to considerable pains, in which there is very little credit, I am afraid."

"His interest," the Governor went on, "as he has assured me, arises from a conviction that there is some hidden element in the affair that, if it had been brought out, might have put a different face upon it."

Harry bowed but did not answer.

"You have a good reason, I take it, for maintaining the silence as to yourself which my friend here finds so difficult?"

"The very best," said Harry grimly.

The Governor mused a moment. "You will pardon me, I am sure, if I ask you one other question. Have you ever been in prison?"

"No," said Harry.

"Have you committed crime—in the past?"

"As the law counts it, no."