if
death rather than life had confronted them in each other's faces. What
did it mean? What secret of a deep and deadly nature could lie between
these two, that a scene of such evident import could take place between
them? He dared not think; he could do nothing but gaze upon the figure
of the man he had portrayed, and wonder if he would be able to identify
the original in case he ever met him. The face was more or less a
failure, of course, but the form, the cut of the clothes, the manner of
carriage, and the general aspect of strong and puissant manhood which
distinguished the whole figure, could not be so far from correct but
that, with a hint from surrounding circumstances, he would know the man
himself when he saw him. At all events, he meant to imprint the possible
portrait upon his mind in case----in case what? Pausing he asked himself
this question with stern determination, and could find no answer.

"I will burn the sketch at once, and think of it and her no more," he
muttered, half-rising.

But he did not do it. Some remembrance crossed his mind of what the
young fellow downstairs had said about retaining it as a _souvenir_, and
he ended in folding it up and putting it away somewhat carefully in his
memorandum-book, with a vow that he would leave Sibley and its troublous
mystery at the first moment of release that he could possibly obtain.
The pang which this decision cost him convinced him that it was indeed
high time he did so.

VII.

MISS FIRMAN.

I confess with all humility that at times the line
of demarcation between truth and fiction is
rendered so indefinite and indistinct, that I
cannot always determine, with unerring certainty,
whether an event really happened to me, or whether
_I_ only dreamed it.--LONGFELLOW.

MR. BYRD, upon waking next morning, found himself disturbed by a great
perplexity. Were the words then ringing in his ears, real words, which
he had overheard spoken outside of his door some time during the past
night, or were they merely the empty utterances of a more than usually
vivid dream?

He could not tell. He could remember the very tone of voice in which he
fancied them to have been spoken--a tone which he had no difficulty in
recognizing as that of the landlord of the hotel; could even recall the
faint sounds of bustle which accompanied them, as though the person
using them had been showing another person