dy incoordinate, but if eyes might have rested
upon him as he answered his wife they would have seen a strange thing;
he sat, apparently steady and collected, his expression cool, his body
quiet, poised exactly to the quality of his reply, for the same strange
reason that a young girl smiles archly and coquettes to a telephone.

"But, Martin, you oughtn't to work so hard. You'll break down--"

"No fear of that," he replied, cheerfully. "You can leave something on
the sideboard for me."

After another fluttering remonstrance, she went away, and the room was
silent again. His arms rested upon the desk, and his head slowly sank
between his elbows. When he lifted it again the clock on the
mantel-piece had tinkled once. It was half-past seven. He took a
sheet of note-paper from a box before him and began to write, but when
he had finished the words, "My dear wife and Mamie," his fingers shook
so violently that he could go no further. He placed his left hand over
the back of his right to steady it, but found the device unavailing:
the pen left mere zigzags on the page, and he dropped it.

He opened a lower drawer of the desk and took out of it a pistol; rose,
went to the door, tried it once more, and again was satisfied of his
seclusion. Then he took the weapon in both hands, the handle against
his fingers, one thumb against the trigger, and, shaking with nausea,
lifted it to the level of his eyes. His will betrayed him; he could
not contract his thumb upon the trigger, and, with a convulsive shiver,
he dropped the revolver upon the desk.

He locked the door of the room behind him, crept down the stairs and
out of the front-door. He walked shamblingly, when he reached the
street, keeping close to the fences as he went on, now and then
touching the pickets with his hands like a feeble old man.

He had always been prompt; it was one of the things of which he had
been proud: in all his life he had never failed to keep a business
engagement precisely upon the appointed time, and the Court-house bell
clanged eight when Sam Warden opened the door for his old employer
to-night.

The two young people looked up gravely from the script-laden table
before them as Martin Pike came into the strong lamplight out of the
dimness of the hall, where only a taper burned. He shambled a few limp
steps into the room and came to a halt. Big as he was, his clothes
hung upon him loosely, like coverlets upon a collapsed bed; and he
se