Steele--" The mayor's tone hardened, so did his
manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before
he took up politics and an office. "Mr. Steele, I do not mean you to
disturb my house or to rob me of my wife. What was your life before you
met Olympia Brewster?"

A pause, the slightest in the world,--but the keen eye of the astute
lawyer noted it, and his tone grew in severity and assurance. "You have
known for two years that this woman whom you called yours was within
your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her.
Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to
which I have just alluded?"

Had the random shot told? The secretary's eye did not falter, nor his
figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look
and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight
had struck his soul--the flush of his triumph was gone.

Mayor Packard was merciless.

"Only two considerations could hold back a man like you from urging a
claim he regarded as a sacred right; the fact of a former marriage or
the remembrance of a forfeited citizenship--pardon me, we can not mince
matters in a strait like this--which would delegalize whatever contract
you may have entered into."

Still the secretary's eye did not swerve, though he involuntarily
stretched forth his hand toward the table as if afraid of betraying a
tremor in his rigidly drawn-up figure.

"Was there the impediment of a former marriage?"

No answer from the sternly set lips.

"Or was it that you once served a term--a very short term, cut short by
a successful attempt at escape in a Minnesota prison?"

"Insults!" broke from those set lips and nothing more.

"Mr. Steele, I practised law in that state for a period of three years.
All the records of the office and of the prison register are open to me.
Over which of them should I waste my time?"

Then the tiger broke loose in the man who from the aggressor had become
the attacked, and he cried:

"I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions in
your ear; the devil and nothing else."

But the mayor, satisfied that he made his point, smiled calmly, saying:

"No, not the devil, but yourself. You, even the you of seven years back,
would not have lived in any country town if necessity, or let us
say, safety, had not demanded it. You, with your looks and your
ambitions,--to marry at twenty-five a girl from th