ught," Lot returned.

Burr made another motion towards the door. "I can't stand here any
longer," he said. "I'll go for the deed." Margaret Bean, moving as
softly as she could in her starched draperies, fled back to the
kitchen.

"Wait a minute," Lot said.

"Well," returned Burr, impatiently.

Lot got up, went over to the mantel-shelf, and stood there a minute,
leaning against it, his face hidden. When he looked at Burr again he
was so white that his cousin started. "Are you sick?" he cried, with
harsh concern.

Lot smiled with stiff lips. "Only with the life-sickness that smites
the child when it enters the world, and makes it weep with its first
breath," he answered.

"If you want to say anything to me, Lot, talk like a man, and not a
book," Burr cried out, with another step towards the door; and yet he
spoke kindly enough, for there was something in his cousin's face
which aroused his pity.

"It is not--" began Lot, and stopped, and caught his breath. Burr
watched him half alarmed; he looked in mortal agony. Lot clutched the
carven edge of the mantel-shelf, then loosened his fingers. "If," he
said, brokenly, looking at Burr with the eyes of one who awaits a
mortal blow, "you want--Madelon--it is not--too late. She--I know how
she feels--towards you."

Burr turned white, as he stared at him. "She--she was going to marry
you!" he said with a sneer.

"Do--you know why?"

Burr shook his head, still staring at his cousin.

"It was the price of--your--acquittal."

Burr did not move his eyes from Lot's face. He looked as if he were
reading something there writ in startling characters, against which
his whole soul leaped up in incredulity. "My God, I see!" he groaned
out slowly, at length. And then he said, sharply, "But--you were
going to marry her. Why did you give her up?"

"I loved her," Lot said, simply. His white face worked.

"But now--you--ask me to--"

"I love her!" Lot said again, with a gasp.

Burr strode forward, quite up to his cousin, and grasped his hand
warmly for the first time in his life. "Before the Lord, Lot," he
said, huskily, "'twas you, and not me, she should have fancied in the
first of it."

"It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love
as he is," Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy
stung him hard.

"What do you mean?"

"Woman reverses creation. She is a sublimated particle of a man, and
she builds a god from her own superstruct