whose life he had so
wantonly helped to wreck. Then he laughed cruelly and turned abruptly
back on his tracks and returned once more to the harvesters.

Prudence gained the house and went straight to her room. She wanted to
be alone. She wanted to straighten out the chaos of her thoughts. She
heard the cheery voices of her mother and Alice talking in the
kitchen. She heard the clatter of plates and dishes, and she knew that
these two were washing up. But beyond that she noticed nothing; she
did not even see the plump figure of Sarah Gurridge approaching the
house from the direction of Leonville.

Once in her own little room she flung herself into an arm-chair and
sat staring straight in front of her. Her paramount feeling was one of
awful horror. The mystery was solved, and George Iredale was the
murderer. The metal alarm clock ticked away upon the wooden top of her
bureau, and the sound pervaded the room with its steady throb. Her
feelings, her thoughts, seemed to pulsate in concert with its rhythm.
The words which expressed her dominant emotions hammered themselves
into her brain with the steady precision of the ticking--

"George Iredale, the murderer of Leslie Grey!"

The moments passed, but time brought the girl no relief. All thought
of the man who had told her of this thing had passed from her. Only
the fact remained. Slowly, as she sat with nerves tingling and
whirling brain, a flush of blood mounted to her head, her brain became
hot, and she seemed to be looking out on a red world. The ticking of
the clock grew fainter and more distant. The room seemed to diminish
in size, while the objects about her drew nearer and nearer. A sense
of compression was hers, although she seemed to be gazing out over
some great distance with everything around her in due perspective.

Mechanically she rose and opened the window; then she returned to her
chair with something of the action of an automaton.

And as she sat the blood seemed to recede from her brain and an icy
dew broke out upon her forehead. She was numbed with a sort of
paralysis now, and the measured beat of the clock no longer pounded
out the words of her thought. Only her heart beat painfully, and she
was conscious of a horrible void. Something was wrong with her, but
she was incapable of realizing what it was.

She moved, the chair creaked under her, and again thought flowed
through her brain. It came with a rush; the deadly numbness had gone
as quickly a