, and thrilling with horror and
indignation. "Go! or--no, dare to lay a hand on me, and I'll dash the
lamp in your face! Go now! or I will summon help. It is at hand,
below. And armed help."

There was a pause. The wolf-man stared at the light with villainous
eyes, but the contemplated attack was not forthcoming. The creature
muttered something which the dreamer lost. Then it moved away; not as
it had come, but groping its way blindly. A moment later the light
went out too, the cries of the coyotes were hushed, and the moon shone
down on the scene as before. And the dreamer, still feeling himself
imprisoned, watched the great yellow globe until it disappeared below
the horizon. Then, as the darkness closed over him, he seemed to
sleep, for the scene died out and recollection faded away.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE RENUNCIATION

The early morning sun was streaming in through the window of the sick
man's room when Tresler at last awoke to consciousness. And, curiously
enough, more than half an hour passed before Diane became aware of the
change in her patient.

And yet she was wide awake too. Sleep had never been further from her
eyes, and her mind never more alert. But for the first time since
Tresler had been brought in wounded, his condition was no longer first
in her thoughts. Something occupied her at the moment of his waking to
the exclusion of all else.

The man lay like a log. His eyes were staring up at the ceiling; he
made no movement, and though perfect consciousness had come to him
there was no interest with it, no inquiry. He accepted his position
like an infant waking from its healthy night-long slumber. Truth to
tell, his weakness held him prisoner, sapping all natural inclination
from mind and body. All his awakening brought him was a hazy,
indifferent recollection of a bad dream; that, and a background of the
events at Willow Bluff.

If the man were suffering from a bad dream, the girl's expression
suggested the terrible reality of her thought. There was something
worse than horror in her eyes, in the puckering of her brows, in the
nervous compression of her lips. There was a blending of terror and
bewilderment in the brown depths that contemplated the wall before
her, and every now and then her pretty figure moved with a palpable
shudder. Her thoughts were reviewing feverishly scenes similar to
those in her patient's dream, only with her they were terrible
realities which she had witnessed only