o the valley
of a great shadow. Tell me, Elsa, dear: is your father always fully
accountable for his actions?"

Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and there were tense lines of
suffering about the sweet mouth.

"You have guessed the secret--my secret," she said, with the heart-break
in her tone. And then: "Oh, you don't know, you can't imagine, what
terrible agonies I have endured: and alone, always alone!"

"Tell me," he commanded lovingly. "I have a good right to know."

"The best right of all: the right of a patient and loving friend." She
stopped, and then went on in the monotone of despair: "It is in the
blood--a dreadful heritage. Do you--do you know how your father died,
Breckenridge?"

"Not circumstantially; in an illness, I have been told. I was too young
to know anything more than I was told; too young to feel the loss. Did
some one tell me it was a fever?"

"It was not a fever," she said sorrowfully. "He was poisoned--by a
horrible mistake. My father and his brother Abner were practising
physicians in Lexington, your old home and ours; both of them young,
ardent and enthusiastic in their profession. Uncle Abner was called to
prescribe for your father--his life-long friend--in a trivial sickness.
By some frightful mistake, the wrong drug was given and your father
died. Poor Uncle Abner paid for it with his reason, and, a few months
later, with his own life. And a little while after his brother's death
in the asylum, Father threw up his practice and his profession, and came
here to bury himself in Arcadia."

The Kentuckian remembered Colonel Craigmiles's sudden seizure at his
first sight of the dead Ballard's son, and saw the pointing of it.
Nevertheless, he said, soberly: "That proves nothing, you know."

"Nothing of itself, perhaps. But it explains all the fearful things I
have seen with my own eyes. Two years ago, after the trouble with Mr.
Braithwaite, father seemed to change. He became bitterly vindictive
against the Arcadia Company, and at times seemed to put his whole soul
into the fight against it. Then the accidents began to happen, and--oh,
I can't tell you the dreadful things I have seen, or the more dreadful
ones I have suspected! I have watched him--followed him--when he did not
suspect it. After dinner, the night you arrived, he left us all on the
portico at Castle 'Cadia, telling me that he was obliged to come down
here to the mine. Are you listening?"

"You needn't ask that: p