l come back to the spot,--to the
black, black hole. He cannot help it. I _know_ that. Oh, how well I
know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,--caught in the web of
proofs I am weaving!"

He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the
web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of
him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord.

"And you _will_ wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not
stir till the thing is sure?"

He would not stir till the thing was sure.

[Illustration: "I am waiting busily for her slayer."]

As soon as it was dark enough to slip over to the Byingtons' unseen, she
went, bearing to Ruth Isabel's apologetic good-bys, trying her small
best to play at words with the General, and quickly getting away again,
grateful for a breath of their atmosphere, though distressfully
convinced that Ruth had divined the whole trouble, through the joy
betrayed by herself on hearing that Leonard would be away for a week.

She went home and slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor
the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked
the crackle and glare, and the crash, of the burning and falling temple.

XX

A DOUBLE RETURN

Let us not attempt the picture of Isabel keeping the happy guise of a
wedding guest among her kindred and childhood playmates while her heart
burned with perpetual misery, yearning, and alarm. "My baby, my baby!"
cried her breast, while the babe slept sweetly under faultless care.

Nor need we draw a close portrait of her husband's mind, if mind it
could longer be called. A horror of sleep, a horror of being awake and
aware, remorse, phantoms, voices, sudden blazings of wrath as suddenly
gone, sweating panics, that craven care of life which springs so rank as
the soul decays, and a steady, cunning determination to keep whole the
emptied shell of reputation and rank,--these were the things that filled
his hours by day, by night; these, and a frightful expectance of one
accusing, child-claiming ghost that never came. The air softened to
Indian summer; the ice faded off the pool; a million leaves, crimson and
bronze, scarlet and gold, dropped tenderly upon its silvering breadth
and lay still; and both the joyless master of the larger house and the
merry maid of the cottage asked Heaven impatiently if the pond would
never freeze over again.

It was Saturday afternoon when