omparative security. Well, what would you do yourself?"

Gwynne shuddered. His own eyes were hunted. "How, in God's name, can any
man tell what he would do until he is in the same hole? I should like to
think that I would speak out and take the consequences. There is little
danger of your swinging, and as for imprisonment--one way or another
you've got to answer for your crime, and it seems to me that the honest
thing is to accept the penalty of the law you live under."

"Well, it doesn't to me," said Zeal, coolly, and lighting another
cigarette. "I asked the question merely out of curiosity, as the
workings of your mind always interest me. But I have quite made up my
own mind. The only reason I hesitated a moment--to be exact, it was half
a day--was on your account. Of course I know what my death will mean to
you."

"It was for that reason I was almost coward enough not to remonstrate."
Gwynne scratched a match several times before he succeeded in getting a
light. "Nevertheless, I meant it."

"Don't doubt it. And I am sorry--it is about the only regret I shall
take with me, that and some remorse on account of the girls. I suppose
Strathland will throw them a bone each--"

"I will look out for them. But you are not bent on this horror!" he
burst out. Wild plans of drugging his cousin, of locking him up, chased
through his mind, and at the same time he was sick with the certainty of
his own impotence. He knew his cousin, and he had the sensation that an
illuminated scroll of fate dangled before his eyes.

Zeal nodded. His excitement, his fears, had left him. He felt something
of the swagger in calm peculiar to the condemned in their final hour,
that last great rally of the nerves to feed the fires of courage. He
finished his cigarette and flung himself on the sofa.

"Wake me at twenty to seven, will you?" he asked. "I have ordered the
trap."

XVI

The young Marquess of Strathland and Zeal sat alone in the smoking-room
at Capheaton--the guests, with the exception of Flora Thangue and Isabel
Otis had departed six days ago--sunk in a melancholy so profound that
his brain was mercifully inactive: if the history of the past week was
dully insistent the future was not.

He had witnessed the descent of his grandfather and cousin into the
vault of the chapel at Strathland Abbey two days before, and after the
necessary interviews with stewards and family solicitors had returned
this afternoon to Capheaton with