ut--"

"But what?"

"Well--you see--I didn't think he could possibly care about anything but
himself. I thought he was as hard as a millstone all through. Well, he
isn't. That's so queer!"

The speaker's voice took a dreamy tone.

Sorell glanced in bitterness at the maimed hand lying on the bed. It was
still bandaged, but he knew very well what sort of a shapeless, ruined
thing it would emerge, when the bandages were thrown aside. It was
strange and fascinating--to a student of psychology--that Otto should
have been brought, so suddenly, so unforeseeably, into this pathetic and
intimate relation with the man to whom, essentially, he owed his
disaster. But what difference did it make in the quality of the Marmion
outrage, or to any sane judgment of Douglas Falloden?

"Go to sleep, old boy," he said at last. "You'll have a hard time
to-morrow."

"What, the inquest? Oh, I don't mind about that. If I could only
understand that fellow!"

He threw his head back, staring at the ceiling.

Otto Radowitz, in spite of Sorell's admonitions, slept very little that
night. His nights were apt to be feverish and disturbed. But on this
occasion imagination and excitement made it impossible to stop the brain
process, the ceaseless round of thought; and the hours of darkness were
intolerably long. Memory went back behind the meeting with the dying man
on the hillside, to an earlier experience--an hour of madness, of
"possession." His whole spiritual being was still bruised and martyred
from it, like that sufferer of old whom the evil spirit "tore" in
departing. What had delivered him? The horror was still on him, still
his master, when he became aware of that white face on the grass--

He drowsed off again. But in his half-dream, he seemed to be kneeling
again and reciting Latin words, words he had heard last when his mother
was approaching her end. He was more than half sceptical, so far as the
upper mind was concerned; but the under-consciousness was steeped in
ideas derived from his early home and training, ideas of sacrifice,
forgiveness, atonement, judgment--the common and immortal stock of
Christianity. He had been brought up in a house pervaded by the
crucifix, and by a mother who was ardently devout.

But why had God--if there was a God--brought this wonderful thing to
pass? Never had his heart been so full of hatred as in that hour of
lonely wandering on the moor, before he perceived the huddled figure
lying by the s