me--worth all the chances I'm taking, and more. I'll stay."

Ballard gripped the womanish hand lying on the coverlet. Here, after
all, and under all the overlayings of pose and craftsman egotism, was a
man with a man's heart and courage.

"You're a brave fool, Wingfield," he said, warmly; "and because you are
brave and a man grown, you shall be one of us. We--Bromley and
I--bluffed you to-day for a woman's sake. If you could have got away
from the excitement of the man-hunt for a single second, I know your
first thought would have been for the woman whose lifted finger silences
three of us. Because you seemed to forget this for the moment, I knocked
you down with your own theory. Does that clear another of the horizons
for you?"

"Immensely. And I deserved all you gave me. Until I'm killed off, you
may comfort yourself with the thought that one of the gallant three is
here, in the wings, as you might say, ready and willing to do what he
can to keep the curtain from rising on any more tragedy."

"Thank you," said Ballard, heartily; "that will be a comfort." Then,
with a parting hand-grip and an added word of caution to the man who
knew too much, he left the room and the house, finding his way
unattended to the great portico and to the path leading down to the
river road.

The mile faring down the valley in the velvety blackness of the warm
summer night was a meliorating ending to the day of revelations and
alarms; and for the first time since Wingfield's clever unravelling of
the tangled mesh of mystery, the Kentuckian was able to set the accusing
facts in orderly array. Yet now, as before, the greatest of the
mysteries refused to take its place in the wellnigh completed circle of
incriminating discoveries. That the King of Arcadia, Elsa's father and
the genial host of the great house on the knoll, was a common murderer,
lost to every humane and Christian prompting of the soul, was still as
incredible as a myth of the Middle Ages.

"I'll wake up some time in the good old daylight of the every-day,
commonplace world, I hope," was Ballard's summing-up, when he had
traversed the reflective mile and had let himself into the office
bungalow to find Bromley sleeping peacefully in his bunk. "But it's a
little hard to wait--with the air full of Damocles-swords, and with the
dear girl's heart gripped in a vise that I can't unscrew. That is what
makes it bitterer than death: she knows, and it is killing her by
inches--in