ican letter
hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing
its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope,
he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been
contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing space
before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of
a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn
and his battle front arranged.

He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that
he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so,
his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be
considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him
to an avowal, it had been with the vague sense of realization that,
if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so,
and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until,
in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst
fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to
confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other
hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all,
acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the
fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm
himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?

After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil's advocate
that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The
man of Ribero's story might still be some one else. He had never felt
the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the
libertine, the assassin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder
logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr.
Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant
nothing more than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be
merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American cafe, when
the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown "H. S. R.," had
probably taken Ribero's testimony at its face value. Then, out of the
page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more,
the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. "Since you beat it to
God's Country and went West--" That was the new evidence this
anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!

Assuredly, he must go to South Am