common villainy, in the
deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity
and ignorant trust.

He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn.

"Has it come to this?" he muttered through his clinched teeth--"to
_this!_"

He made an excited forward movement; his foot touched the supports of
the easel, jarring it roughly; the picture fell upon the floor.

"What?" he cried out. "Beck! You! Great God!"

For before him, revealed by the picture's fall, the easel held one
of the fairest memories he had of the woman he had proved himself too
fickle and slight to value rightly.

It was merely a sketch made rapidly one day soon after his arrival and
never wholly completed, but it had been touched with fire and feeling,
and the face looked out from the canvas with eyes whose soft happiness
stung him to the quick with the memories they brought. He had meant to
finish it, and had left it upon the easel that he might turn to it
at any moment, and it had remained there, covered by a stronger
rival--forgotten.

He sat down in a chair and his brow fell upon his hands. He felt as if
he had been clutched and dragged backward by a powerful arm.

When at last he rose, he strode to the picture lying upon the floor,
ground it under his heel, and spurned it from him with an imprecation.

He was, at a certain hour, to reach a particular bend in the road some
miles distant. He was to walk to this place and if he found no one
there, to wait.

When at sunset that evening he reached it, he was half an hour before
the time specified, but he was not the first at the tryst. He was within
twenty yards of the spot when a figure rose from the roots of a tree and
stood waiting for him--the girl Dusk with a little bundle in her hand.

She was not flushed or tremulous with any hint of mental excitement; she
awaited him with a fine repose, even the glow of the dying sun having no
power to add to her color, but as he drew near he saw her look gradually
change. She did not so much as stir, but the change grew slowly, slowly
upon her face, and developed there into definite shape--the shape of
secret, repressed dread.

"What is it," she asked when he at last confronted her, "that ails ye?"

She uttered the words in a half whisper, as if she had not the power to
speak louder, and he saw the hand hanging at her side close itself.

"What is it--that ails ye?"

He waited a few seconds before he answered her.