ear they would break the spell.

"The rest is like a bad dream to me," the man continued in a weary
voice. "Ghost-ridden, haunted, I came to this country incognito--under
what you call an assumed name. For a short time I stayed in New
Orleans----"

"But your violin!" Betty interrupted in a voice that amazed her, it
seemed so little and weak. "Surely you were under contract."

The man turned on her what was almost a pitying look from his sunken
eyes.

"I could not play," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. "To have
gone to my manager would have been like going to the hangman--the
electric chair, what you have in this country. No, mademoiselle, I was a
murderer, a man hunted by his fellowmen. There was but one thing for me
to do--to hide, to dodge about like a rabbit from a pack of baying dogs.
Hide!" he added bitterly. "I could not hide from myself.

"Always when the night grows dark and the wind it makes to howl around
this place I can hear my brother's voice uplifted in anger. We quarreled
over something my uncle had said--a foolish quarrel. He called me liar,
and I--something snapped in my brain, I think, and for a moment
everything went red. There was a wine bottle on the table--we had been
drinking--blindly I struck out with it---- Now, when the darkness comes
and the wildcat calls into the night with a scream like a soul in
torment, I hear again the tinkling of that bottle as it shattered, the
short groan, the falling of a heavy body.

"It is a wonder that I have not gone mad," he said. "Many a time I have
prayed that I might or that I might find courage to end this miserable
life and go to join my brother. But I am a coward, a coward----" His
voice lowered till it was almost inaudible and tears trickled through
the long white fingers. "I have not the courage even to die. There is a
tribunal above that I should have to face, more just, more awful, than
any man-made law. There you have what Paul Loup has become."

"But you must not speak that way," said Betty, whose quick mind had been
forging ahead while the man had been speaking. "It is one thing to kill
a man deliberately, and quite another to kill in hot blood, blindly.
Besides," she added eagerly, "you are not even sure that you did kill
your brother. Did you--have you seen the papers since--since you ran
away?"

"No," said the man. His tone was dead, hopeless. "I was afraid of what I
might find there. He was dead, Mademoiselle," he added wearily.