ty movement, and a tall dark woman in a long
traveling cloak swept through them.

She paused for a moment on the threshold, and her flashing black eyes
seemed to take in every detail of the little scene. She saw Helen, fair
and comely, with an added beauty in her soft, animated expression, and
she saw her companion, his face alight with intelligence and
sensibility, and with the glow of a new life in his brilliant eyes. The
perfume of the Egyptian tobacco which hung about the room, the tea tray,
their two chairs drawn up before the fire--nothing escaped her. It all
seemed to increase her wrath.

For she was very angry. Her form was dilated with passion, and her
voice, when she spoke, shook with it. But it was not her anger, nor her
threatening gestures, before which they both shrank back for a moment,
appalled. It was her awful likeness to the murdered Sir Geoffrey
Kynaston.

"Helen!" she cried, "they told me of this; but if I had not seen it with
my own eyes, I would never have believed it."

Helen rose to her feet, pale, but with a kindling light in her eyes, and
a haughty poise of her fair shapely head.

"You speak in riddles, Rachel," she said quietly. "I do not understand
you."

A very storm of hysterical passion seemed to shake the woman, who had
approached a little further into the room.

"Not understand me! Listen, and I will make it plain. You were engaged
to marry my brother. I come here, almost from his funeral, and I find
you thus--with his murderer! Girl, I wonder that you do not die of
shame!"

His murderer! For a moment the color fled from cheeks and lips, and the
room seemed whirling around her. But one glance at him brought back her
drooping courage. He was standing close to her side, erect and firm as a
statue, with his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon Rachel
Kynaston. Blanched and colorless as his face was, there was no flinching
in it.

"It is false!" she said proudly. "Ask him yourself."

"Ask him!" She turned upon him like a tigress, her eyes blazing with
fury. "Let him hear what I have to say, and deny it. Is it not you who
followed him from city to city all over the world, seeking always his
life? Is it not you who kept him for many years from his native land for
fear of blood-shed--yours or his? Is it not you who have fought with him
and been worsted, and sworn to carry your enmity with you through life,
and bury it only in his grave? Look at me, man, if you dare, look me i