last words had goaded Balder past bearing. As she turned away, his
face looked grim and forlorn. He balanced with half-raised arms on the
cliff's brink. The river slumbered bluely on below, peace was aloft in
the sky, and joy in the trees and grass. But in the man were darkness
and despair and loathing of his God-given life!

The thing he meditated was not to be, however. Close in shore a little
boat glided into view, beating up against stream. In the stern, the
sheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, sat Balder's old friend
Charon. He nodded up at the young man with a recognizing grin. Then he
laid his tiller-hand aside his brown cheek and sang out,--

"Look out there, Capt'n! Davy Jones's got back,--run foul of you!"

The next moment he put down the helm and ran out.

Meantime Balder, coloring from shame, had stepped back from his
dangerous position; and the peril was past. But the paltering
irresolution which he had at all points displayed urged him to redeem
himself,--else was he lower than a criminal. He went towards
Gnulemah,--knelt down,--caught her dress,--he knew not what he did! In
a blind dance of sentences he told her that he was a murderer, that
all he had said pointed at himself, that with his own hands he had
killed Hiero, whose body now lay at the bottom of the sea; many
frantic words he spoke. Thus, without art or rhetoric, roughly dragged
forth by head and ears, came his momentous confession into the world.
Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he
had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose
arrow has just flown, these words reached him:--

"Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees."

Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah,
swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water. She
put out her arm and tenderly supported him.

"Where?" said he at length.

"Near the house,--there!" she pointed.

Balder began to walk forward doubtfully. But, suddenly realizing what
lay before him, clearness and vigor ebbed back. He saw a figure turn
the corner of the house. Then he leapt out and ran like a stag-hound!

XXIV.

UNCLE HIERO AT LAST.

In a couple of minutes Balder was at the house, breathless: the figure
was nowhere to be seen. He sprang across the broad portico, and
hurried with sounding feet through the oaken hall. Should he go up
stairs, or on to the conservatory? The sound of a