ground--the grass
all dewy sparkles and an early robin teetering on a thorn-bush.
Eight--nine--ten--he caught himself counting the paces.

He wiped his forehead. Between the hemlocks now were two figures
facing each other, one twitching uncertainly, the other palely rigid;
and at one side, held screen-wise, a raised umbrella. In some ghostly
way he could see straight through the latter--see the doctor's hand
gripping the handle, his own, outstretched beyond its edge, holding a
handkerchief ready to flutter down. A silly subterfuge those umbrellas,
but there must be no actual witnesses to the final act of a "gentlemen's
meeting"! A silly code, the whole of it, now happily outgrown! He
thought thus with a kind of dumb irritant wonder, while the green
picture hung a moment--as a stone thrown in air hangs poised at height
before it falls--then dissolved itself in two sharp crackles, with a
gasping interval between. The scene blurred into a single figure
huddling down--huddling down--

"_Which did she love?_" The major shook his head helplessly. It was,
after all, only the echo, become all at once audible on a shallow
woman's lips, of a question that had always haunted him. It had first
come to him on the heels of that duel, when he had stood, somewhat later
that hateful morning, holding a saddled horse before the big pillared
porch. It had whispered itself then from every moving leaf. "_Sassoon or
Valiant?_" If she had loved Sassoon, of what use the letter Valiant was
so long penning in the library? But--if it were Valiant she loved? The
man who, having sworn not to lift his hand against the other, had broken
his sacred word to her! Who had stained the unwritten code by facing an
opponent maddened with liquor! Yet, what was there a woman might not
condone in the one man? Would she read, forgive and send for him?

The major laughed out suddenly, harshly, in the quiet room, and looked
down as if he expected to see that letter still lying in his hand. But
the laugh could not still a regular pulsing sound that was in his
ears--elfin like the voices, but as distinct--the sound of a horse's
hoofs going from Damory Court.

He had heard those hoof-beats echo in his brain for thirty years!

CHAPTER XVII

THE TRESPASSER

Till the sun was high John Valiant lay on his back in the fragrant
grass, meditatively watching a bucaneering chicken-hawk draw widening
circles against the blue and listening to the vibrant tattoo of