flinging them at her in one great handful, rushed to the drawers below,
emptied them, and, finding nothing, attacked the bookcase.

"The money is somewhere here. You can't fool me," he yelled. "I saw the
spot your eyes lit on when I first came into the room. Is it behind
these books?" he growled, pulling them out and throwing them
helter-skelter over the floor. "Women is smart in the hiding business.
Is it behind these books, I say?"

They had been, or rather had been placed between the books, but she had
taken them away, as we know, and he soon began to realise that his
search was bringing him nothing. Leaving the bookcase he gave the books
one kick, and seizing her by the arm, shook her with a murderous glare
on his strange and distorted features.

"Where's the money?" he hissed. "Tell me, or you are a goner."

He raised his heavy fist. She crouched and all seemed over, when, with a
rush and cry, a figure dashed between them and he fell, struck down by
the very stick she had so long been expecting to see fall upon her own
head. The man who had been her terror for hours had at the moment of
need acted as her protector.

* * * * *

She must have fainted, but if so, her unconsciousness was but momentary,
for when she woke again to her surroundings she found the tramp still
standing over her adversary.

"I hope you don't mind, ma'am," he said, with an air of humbleness she
certainly had not seen in him before, "but I think the man's dead." And
he stirred with his foot the heavy figure before him.

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried. "That would be too fearful. He's shocked,
stunned; you cannot have killed him."

But the tramp was persistent. "I'm 'fraid I have," he said. "I done it
before. I'm powerful strong in the biceps. But I couldn't see a man of
that colour frighten a lady like you. My supper was too warm in me,
ma'am. Shall I throw him outside the house?"

"Yes," she said, and then, "No; let us first be sure there is no life
in him." And, hardly knowing what she did, she stooped down and peered
into the glassy eyes of the prostrate man.

Suddenly she turned pale--no, not pale, but ghastly, and cowering back,
shook so that the tramp, into whose features a certain refinement had
passed since he had acted as her protector, thought she had discovered
life in those set orbs, and was stooping down to make sure that this was
so, when he saw her suddenly lean forward and, impetuously p