rly; and, indeed, he wondered now how he could ever have esteemed it
formidable. Jack was his half-brother. In noveldom or in a melodrama
this discovery would have transformed their mutual dealings; but as a
workaday world's fact, Musgrave would not honestly say that it had in
any way affected his feelings toward Jack, and it appeared to have left
Charteris equally unaltered.

"I am not sure, though. We can only guess where Jack is concerned. He
goes his own way always, tricky and furtive and lonelier than any other
human being I have ever known. It is loneliness that looks out of his
eyes, really, even when he is mocking and sneering," the colonel
meditated.

Then he sighed and went back to the tabulation of his lists of wills.

V

The day was growing strong in the maple-grove behind Matocton. As yet,
the climbing sun fired only the topmost branches, and flooded them with
a tempered radiance through which birds plunged and shrilled vague
rumors to one another. Beneath, a green twilight lingered--twilight
which held a gem-like glow, chill and lucent and steady as that of an
emerald. Vagrant little puffs of wind bustled among the leaves, with a
thin pretense of purpose, and then lapsed, and merged in the large,
ambiguous whispering which went stealthily about the grove.

Rudolph Musgrave sat on a stone beside the road that winds through the
woods toward the railway station, and smoked, nervously. He was
disheartened of the business of living, and, absurdly enough, as it
seemed to him, he was hungry.

"It has to be done quietly and without the remotest chance of Anne's
ever hearing of it, and without the remotest chance of its ever having
to be done again. I have about fifteen minutes in which to convince
Patricia both of her own folly and of the fact that Jack is an
unmitigated cad, and to get him off the place quietly, so that Anne will
suspect nothing. And I never knew any reasonable argument to appeal to
Patricia, and Jack will be a cornered rat! Yes, it is a large contract,
and I would give a great deal--a very great deal--to know how I am going
to fulfil it."

At this moment his wife and Mr. Charteris, carrying two portmanteaux,
came around a bend in the road not twenty feet from Musgrave. They were
both rather cross. In the clean and more prosaic light of morning an
elopement seemed almost silly; moreover, Patricia had had no breakfast,
and Charteris had been much annoyed by his wife, who had breakf