d-handed. I knew that she
loved me even as she was divorcing me. On the day the divorce was given
to her, my brain went bad. The world turned red, and then black, and
then red again. And I--"

Peter God paused again, with a hand to his head.

"You came up here," said Philip, in a low voice.

"Not--until I had seen the man who ruined me," replied Peter God
quietly. "We were alone in his office. I gave him a fair chance to
redeem himself--to confess what he had done. He laughed at me, exulted
over my fall, taunted me. And so--I killed him."

He rose from his chair and stood swaying. He was not excited.

"In his office, with his dead body at my feet, I wrote a note to
Josephine," he finished. "I told her what I had done, and again I swore
my innocence. I wrote her that some day she might hear from me, but not
under my right name, as the law would always be watching for me. It was
ironic that on that human cobra's desk there lay an open Bible, open at
the Book of Peter, and involuntarily I wrote the words to
Josephine--PETER GOD. She has kept my secret, while the law has hunted
for me. And this--"

He held the pages of the letter out to Philip.

"Take the letter--go outside--and read what she has written," he said.
"Come back in half an hour. I want to think."

Back of the cabin, where Peter God had piled his winter's fuel, Philip
read the letter; and at times the soul within him seemed smothered, and
at times it quivered with a strange and joyous emotion.

At last vindication had come for Peter God, and before he had read a
page of the letter Philip understood why it was that Josephine had sent
him with it into the North. For nearly seven years she had known of
Peter God's innocence of the thing for which she had divorced him. The
woman--the dead man's accomplice--had told her the whole story, as
Peter God a few minutes before had told it to Curtis; and during those
seven years she had traveled the world seeking for him--the man who
bore the name of Peter God.

Each night she had prayed God that the next day she might find him, and
now that her prayer had been answered, she begged that she might come
to him, and share with him for all time a life away from the world they
knew.

The woman breathed like life in the pages Philip read; yet with that
wonderful message to Peter God she pilloried herself for those red and
insane hours in which she had lost faith in him. She had no excuse for
herself, except her grea