ildren who were the children of love raised
rose-bud lips to be kissed.

Ahead lay an indefinite future, of Stygian murk, peopled with melancholy
shades.

Stuart himself did not attempt to sleep. He sat in a chair at his window
and stared out. Once or twice he lighted a pipe, only to let it die to
ashes between his teeth. He must not tarry here, beyond to-morrow. He
had taken either a high and chivalrous ground or a sentimentally weak
one. In either case it was an attitude to which he stood pledged, and
one to which Conscience attached the importance of salvation. How long
could he hold it?

But of the three minds prickled with insomniac activity, the operations
of the elderly husband's were the strangest and most weirdly
interesting. They had thrown off the halter of sanity and ranged into
the imaginative unrestraint of fantastic deviltry.

Sitting alone in the study, Eben sipped brandy and indulged his
abnormality. For him, weaving certainties out of the tenuous threads of
hallucination, there developed the spaciousness and might of epic
tragedies.

The brandy itself was a symptom of his quiet madness. Until recently he
would as readily have fondled a viper as toyed with a bottle.

Now he had formed the habit of lifting a secret glass, as a rite and a
toast to the portrait of the ancestor, with whose spirit he seemed to
commune.

The things that had festered in the unclean soreness of his brain had
tinctured every thought with their poison of monomania, leaving him
without a suspicion of his own miserable deceit. He believed that he
held the imperative commission of the Deity to act as a vicegerent and
an avenger. God had designated him as a prosecutor, and to-night he was
summing up the case against the transgressors.

"A sinful and an adulterous generation!" he breathed with curling lips.

Item by item he went over the evidence, and it fitted and jibed in every
detail. From the first interrupted assignation at Providence to this
evening when he had seen, silhouetted against a starry sky, the man
carrying close to his breast the wife of another, no link failed to join
into a perfect chain of guilt.

But above all he must remain just--as just as the Divinity whose
commission he served. This essence of absolute and impersonal
righteousness demanded an overt act of unquestionable guilt. "So saith
the Lord."

When that deciding proof was established there should fall upon the
sinning pair the wrath of an o