"

"It is a portrait, taken in childhood, of the friend I told you about
the other day----"

"Whom you killed?"

She winced in spite of herself. How lightly, how cruelly he used that
dreadful word!

"Yes, whom I killed--if he is really dead."

"If?"

She kept her eyes on his face.

"I have sometimes doubted," she said. "The body was never found. He may
have run away from home, like you, and gone to South America."

"Let us hope not. That would be a bad memory to carry about with you. I
have d-d-done some hard fighting in my t-time, and have sent m-more than
one man to Hades, perhaps; but if I had it on my conscience that I had
sent any l-living thing to South America, I should sleep badly----"

"Then do you believe," she interrupted, coming nearer to him with
clasped hands, "that if he were not drowned,--if he had been through
your experience instead,--he would never come back and let the past
go? Do you believe he would NEVER forget? Remember, it has cost me
something, too. Look!"

She pushed back the heavy waves of hair from her forehead. Through the
black locks ran a broad white streak.

There was a long silence.

"I think," the Gadfly said slowly, "that the dead are better dead.
Forgetting some things is a difficult matter. And if I were in the place
of your dead friend, I would s-s-stay dead. The REVENANT is an ugly
spectre."

She put the portrait back into its drawer and locked the desk.

"That is hard doctrine," she said. "And now we will talk about something
else."

"I came to have a little business talk with you, if I may--a private
one, about a plan that I have in my head."

She drew a chair to the table and sat down. "What do you think of the
projected press-law?" he began, without a trace of his usual stammer.

"What I think of it? I think it will not be of much value, but half a
loaf is better than no bread."

"Undoubtedly. Then do you intend to work on one of the new papers these
good folk here are preparing to start?"

"I thought of doing so. There is always a great deal of practical work
to be done in starting any paper--printing and circulation arrangements
and----"

"How long are you going to waste your mental gifts in that fashion?"

"Why 'waste'?"

"Because it is waste. You know quite well that you have a far better
head than most of the men you are working with, and you let them make a
regular drudge and Johannes factotum of you. Intellectually you are as
far ahead of