been alone with the murderer.)
"On returning from your nurse's cabin you left the direct path and
followed the sound of angry voices to the gorge by Mill's spring----"

"I did not go to play the spy. He lied when he said that," she cried
feebly. "I heard the steps, and thought Colonel Merrick had come to
search for me."

"That matters nothing. You saw the deed done. The old man was killed,
and then robbed, in your sight"--I came toward her, and lowered my voice
to a stern, judicial whisper, while the poor girl shrank back as though
I were law itself uttering judgment upon her. If she had known what
stagy guesswork it all was! "When you were discovered, the murderer
would have shot you to insure your silence."

"I wish he had! It was Thad who would have done that. The white man's
way was more cruel--oh, God knows it was more cruel!"

(There were two then.) I was very sorry for the girl, but I had a keen
pleasure in the slow unfolding of the secret, just as I suppose the
physician takes delight in the study of a new disease, even if it kills
the patient.

"Yes," I said with emphasis. "I believe that it would have been less
suffering for you, Miss Waring, to have died then than to have lived,
forced as you were to renounce your lover, and to carry about with you
the dread of the threat made by those men."

"I have not said there was a threat made. I have betrayed nothing." She
had seated herself some time before by the table. There was a large
bronze inkstand before her, and as she listened she arranged a half
dozen pens evenly on the rest. The words she heard and spoke mattered
more to her than life or death; her features were livid as those of a
corpse, yet her hands went on with their mechanical work--one pen did
not project a hair's breadth beyond the other. We lawyers know how
common such puerile, commonplace actions are in the supreme moments of
life, and how seldom men wring their hands, or use tragic gesture, or
indeed words.

"No, you have betrayed nothing," I said calmly. "Your self-control has
been remarkable, even when we remember that you believed your confession
would be followed by speedy vengeance, not on your head, but Colonel
Merrick's."

She looked up not able to speak for a minute. "You--you know all?"

"Not all, but enough to assure you that your time of suffering is over.
You can speak freely, unharmed."

Her head dropped on the table. She was crying, and, I think, praying.

"You saw Ho