where
below was audible. Then the sharp crack of the revolver suddenly split
the silence. The lawyer dropped on one knee, holding his arm in the air
as if to ward off attack. Again the revolver rang out, and Grey plunged
forward on his face. The other five shots struck a lifeless body.

A stratum of blue smoke hung breast high in the room as if it were the
departing soul of the man who lay motionless on the floor. Outside were
excited voices, and some one flung himself ineffectually against the
stout locked door.

Allen crossed the room and, turning the key, flung open the door. "I
have murdered your master," he said, handing the revolver butt forward
to the nearest man. "I give myself up. Go and get an officer."

OVER THE STELVIO PASS.

There is no question about it, Tina Lenz was a flirt, as she had a
perfect right to be, living as she did on the romantic shores of Como,
celebrated in song, story, and drama as the lover's blue lake. Tina had
many admirers, and it was just like her perversity to favor the one to
whom her father most objected. Pietro, as the father truly said, was a
beggarly Italian driver, glad of the few francs he got from the
travellers he took over the humble Maloga to the Engadine, or over the
elevated Stelvio to the Tyrol, the lowest and the highest passes in
Europe. It was a sad blow to the hopes as well as the family pride of
old Lenz when Tina defiantly announced her preference for the driver of
the Zweispanner. Old Lenz came of a long and distinguished line of
Swiss hotel-keepers, noted for the success with which they squeezed the
last attainable centime from the reluctant traveller. It was bad enough
that he had no son to inherit his justly celebrated hotel
(_pension_ rates for a stay of not less than eight days), but he
hoped for a son-in-law, preferably of Swiss extraction, to whom he
might, in his old age, hand over the lucrative profession of
deferentially skinning the wealthy Englishman. And now Tina had
deliberately chosen a reckless, unstable Italian who would, in a short
time, scatter to the winds the careful accumulation of years.

"Pietro, the scoundrel, will not have one piastra of my money," cried
the old man wrathfully, dropping into Italian as he was speaking about
a native of Italy.

"No, I shall see that he doesn't," said the girl. "I shall hold the
purse, and he must earn what he spends."

"But if you marry him, you will not have any of it."

"Oh yes, I shal