h feverish volubility, only to have him thrust them aside
with a lacklustre indifference that their futility merited.

"He is discouraged, Gladys; he is at the end of his resources," she said
aside to her friend. "He can try no more."

"How can _you_ believe that?" cried Gladys.

Even in this crisis Lillian noted anew with a wounded amazement the
significant smile on the fair face of her friend, the proud pose of her
head. Could she arrogate such triumphant confidence in the temper and
nature of a man who did not love her?--whose heart and mind were not
trusted to her keeping? That doubt assailed Lillian anew in Bayne's
absence, and in the scope for dreary meditation that the eventless days
afforded it developed a fang that added its cruelties to a grief which
she had imagined could be supplemented by no other sorrow.

It was merely sympathy that animated him in her behalf, she felt sure; it
was pity for her helplessness when none other would abet the hopeless
effort to recover the child. His conviction that Archie still lived
constrained him by the dictates of humanity to seek his rescue. He was
doubtless moved, too, by the great generosity of his heart, his
magnanimity; but not by love--never by love! How could it be, indeed, in
the face of all that had come and gone, and of the constant contrast,
mind, body, and soul, with the perfect, the peerless Gladys!

In this, the dreariest of his absences, seldom a word came to the two
women waiting alternately in agonized expectation or dull despair. For
Bayne was much of the time beyond the reach of postal and telegraphic
facilities. In the endeavor to discover some clue to identify that
strange visitant of the smiling spring sunset, and thus reach other
participants in the crime of the murder and the abduction, Bayne had the
body conveyed to the Great Smoky Range, within the vicinity of the
Briscoe bungalow, discerning from the speech of the man, as well as from
his familiarity with the deed, that he was a native mountaineer. Lillian
had desired to bestow upon him, in return for his intention of aid at the
last, a decent burial, but the interpretation of the metropolitan
undertaker of this commission was so far in excess of the habit of the
rustic region that men who had known old Clenk all their lives did not
recognize him as he lay in his coffin, clean, bathed, shaven, clad in a
suit of respectable black and with all the dignity of immaculate linen,
and they swore tha