er hands, and hysteria
assailed her--a hysteria so acute and so violent that not tears but an
outburst resembling laughter--laughter wild, startling and most
distressing to hear--came from her. She turned and dashed from the room.

My heart paused in its quick beating. In one mad moment of indiscretion
I had destroyed her confidence in me, had brought down in crashing ruins
my hopes, my dreams, my new-found joy.

I felt that I must go hence--that I must quit that domicile forever, and
the sooner the better. With my brain in a whirl, I looked about me for
my hat and my umbrella.

A loud and a compelling voice spoke behind me. I faced about. In the
doorway through which she had just fled stood a fearsome apparition. It
was her uncle, that man so given to carnage among the beasts and birds
of the field, that unerring, that unfailing marksman. He was in his
shirt sleeves, his arms bared to his elbows. Upon his face was a fixed
grin of demoniac determination--the look of one who smiles even as he
slays his prey. And in his hands--ah, dreadful final detail of this
dreadful picture--he held outstretched, extended and presented in my
general direction, a double-barrelled fowling piece, enormous in size
and glittering with metal ornamentation.

"Young man," he cried out, "have one look at this!"

In times of the most extreme peril the thoughts clarify with
inconceivable rapidity. In a flash I comprehended all. She had told him
of the insult to her maidenly modesty, and for it he meant to have my
heart's blood. I was about to become an extinct and bleeding corse. But
before he could raise the hideous instrument of death to his shoulder an
expedient occurred to me. I would save myself from slaughter and
coincidentally save him from the crime of dyeing his hands with the gore
of a fellow being. A low window at the west side of the room,
immediately adjacent to the couch whereon I had been seated,
providentially stood open. I would leap from it and flee. Without a
moment's hesitation I did so.

In such emergencies one does not choose with care one's means of exit.
One departs by the egress most convenient to one. As I plunged through
the opening I remembered that a considerable distance intervened between
the window I had chosen and the sward below. Even as I bounded forth
into space I thought of this. But when one is in mid-air one does not
turn back; a law of physics involving the relation of solid bodies to
the attraction