ave only to move my lips to
free myself."

"I should scarcely advise you to trust to your eloquence. I have been
duly warned, you see."

"Who warned you?" he asked curiously. And, as she disdained to reply:
"Never mind. We can clear that up later. Now let me ask you something."

"You are scarcely in a position to ask questions," she said.

"May I not speak to you?"

"Is it necessary?"

He thought a moment. "No, not necessary. Nothing is in this life, you
know. I thought differently once. Once--when I was younger--six years
younger--I thought happiness was necessary. I found that a man might
live without it."

She stood gazing at him through the shadows, pistol on hip.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean that happiness is not necessary to life. Life goes on all the
same. My life has continued for six years without that happiness which
some believe to be essential."

After a silence she said: "I can tell by the way you speak that you are
well born. I--I dread to do what I simply must do."

He, too, sat silent a long time--long enough for an utterly perverse and
whimsical humor to take complete possession of him.

"_Won't_ you let me go--_this_ time?" he pleaded.

"I cannot."

"You had better let me go while you can," he said, "because, perhaps,
you may find it difficult to get rid of me later."

Affronted, she shrank back from the doorway and stood in the center of
her room, angry, disdainful, beautiful, under the ruddy glory of her
lustrous hair.

His perverse mood changed, too; he leaned forward, studying her
minutely--the splendid gray eyes, the delicate mouth and nose, the full,
sweet lips, the witchery of wrist and hand, and the flowing, rounded
outline of limb and body under the pretty gown. Could this be _she_?
This lovely, mature woman, wearing scarcely a trace of the young girl he
had never forgotten--scarcely a trace save in the beauty of her eyes and
hair--save in the full, red mouth, sweet and sensitive even in its
sudden sullenness?

"Once," he said, and his voice sounded to him like voices heard in
dreams--"once, years and years ago, there was a steamer, and a man and a
young girl on board. Do you mind my telling you about it?"

She stood leaning against the footboard of the bed, not even deigning to
raise her eyes in reply. So he made the slightest stir in his chair; and
then she looked up quickly enough, pistol poised.

"The steamer," said Kerns slowly, "was coming into Southa