eing his eye fall on
Phyllis and remain there staring, and knowing from old Joy that he had
grown enough like his uncle Dan to have been his twin, suffered for her
as well as him.

"Who are _you_?" he cried, still staring. "Where am I?"

The maid did not reply, but her unfaltering gaze met his as if it
neither could nor would do otherwise. Ramsey intuitively followed the
play of her mind. To look again on Gideon Hayle had already recalled
emotions she had striven for half a lifetime to put away, and now they
kept her eyes set on this tortured yet unrelenting advocate of all the
wrongs from which those emotions sprang.

He looked to his mother. "Great God! mother, is this the new Courteney
boat? Well, if this isn't hell's finishing touch! Jule! Where's Jule?
Go, get me Jule!"

Phyllis turned to go but--"No," he cried with a light of sudden purpose
in his face, "you stay. Everybody else go! And send me Jule. Don't send
a doctor, I'm the doctor myself. Get out, all of you, go! This isn't my
death-bed. God! I wish it was, for I'm a cripple for life and will never
walk again--leave! go! and send me Jule!"

Guided by a cabin-boy to Hugh's room, Ramsey found Julian confronting
his father, "California," and the Gilmores. Hugh had led them there for
privacy and stood close at one side. Julian seemed to be suffering a
shock scarcely less than his brother's though it made a wholly different
outward show. His face wore an appalled look, his voice was below its
accustomed pitch, and his words, words which could not have been
premeditated, seemed studiously fit and precise.

"Fortunately," he had been saying before Ramsey appeared, "he
never"--meaning his brother--"goes into the country without his drugs
and instruments--we have them with us yet--and he could tell me what to
do and I did it, or he would have died right there in the swamp."

"But you don't say how the accursed thing happened," said Gideon as
Ramsey entered hardly aware that she was pausing at Hugh's side. The
brother turned and stared on the two.

"Come," said Gideon, "never mind that. How did it happen?"

"It happened, sir, through my own incredible carelessness and by my own
hand. _Don't say a word!_ I would to God I had been the victim and had
fallen dead in my tracks. If I had killed him I would have put the other
load into my brain."

"Oh, if!" solemnly sneered the incredulous father. While he did so
Julian, the profoundness of whose mental torture hi