the rest of our
silver, all my dear father's silver is gone. We found that out this
morning, for what we had used for the feast had been put in a basket
until we could store it away; it is all taken.'

He was shocked and enraged to hear of this further loss. He did not
attempt to reason with her; he had ceased to reason with himself.

'You trusted me when you let me in last night,' he said. 'Don't you
think that you would have had some perception of it last night if I had
been entirely unworthy? Think what an utter and abominable villain I
must be to have accepted your hospitality--to have been so very happy
with you----' So he went on appealing to her heart from the sentiments
that arose in his own.

Madge listened only for a reasonable period; she rose to her feet. 'I
must go,' she said.

He found that she proposed to walk on snow-shoes three miles to the
nearest house, which belonged to a couple of parish priests, where she
would be certain of obtaining a messenger to carry the news of the
robbery to the telegraph station. She could not be brought even to
discuss the advisability of her journey; Morin could not be sent, for
the servants and Eliz would go mad with terror if left alone.

To Courthope's imagination her journey seemed to be an abandonment of
herself to the utmost danger. If between the two houses she failed to
make progress over high drifts and against a heavy gale, what was to
hinder her from perishing? Then, too, there was that villain, who had
seemed to stalk forth from the isolated house afar into the howling
night as easily as the Frankenstein demon, and might even now be
skulking near--a dangerous devil--able to run where others must trudge
toilsomely.

Madge, it seemed, had only come to that room to make her confession and
invoke protection at the shrine of the lost father; she was ready to set
forth without further delay. She would not, in spite of his most
eloquent pleading, set Courthope at liberty to make of him either
messenger or companion.

'The evidence,' she said sadly, 'is all against you. I am very sorry.'

A wilder unrest and vexation at his position returned upon his heart
because of the lightening that had come with the impulse of love. That
impulse still remained, an under-current of calm, a knowledge that his
will and the power of the world were at one, such as men only feel when
they yield themselves to some sudden conversion; but above this
new-found faith the cross-cu