of the ground, but with a note of half-shamed gratitude. "I want to thank
you," he added. "You were brave. It would have turned on you if you had
missed. I know them. I've killed five." He spoke very slowly, huskily.

"Well, you are safe--that is the chief thing," she rejoined, making as
though to depart. But presently she turned back. "Why are you so
dreadfully poor--and everything?" she asked, gently.

His eye wandered over the lake and back again before he answered her, in a
dull, heavy tone, "I've had bad luck, and, when you get down, there are
plenty to kick you farther."

"You weren't always poor as you are now--I mean long ago, when you were
young."

"I'm not so old," he rejoined, sluggishly--"only thirty-four."

She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already
gray, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.

"Yet it must seem long to you," she said, with meaning.

Now he laughed--a laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his
boyhood. Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was
dim in his debilitated mind.

"Too far to go back," he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which had
been strong in him once.

She caught the gleam. She had wisdom beyond her years. It was the greater
because her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense,
for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household
and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the
laboring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and
cheerless, was grammatical.

"If you cannot go back, you can go forward," she said, firmly. "Why should
you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this, who is
idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when there is
so much time to sleep at night?"

A faint flush came on the grayish, colorless face. "I don't sleep at
night," he returned, moodily.

"Why don't you sleep?" she asked.

He did not answer, but stirred the body of the snake with his foot. The
tail moved; he stamped upon the head with almost frenzied violence, out of
keeping with his sluggishness.

She turned away, yet looked back once more--she felt tragedy around her.
"It is never too late to mend," she said, and moved on, but stopped, for a
young man came running from the woods toward her.

"I've had a hunt--such a hunt for you!" the young man said, eagerly, then
stopped short when he saw t