e.

"What suggested to you," I asked one day of Eveena, "the suspicion
that so narrowly saved my life?"

"The carefully steadied hand--you have teased her so often for
spilling everything it carried--and the unsteady eyes. But," she added
reluctantly, "I never liked to watch her--no, not lest you should
notice it--but because she did not seem true in her ways with you; and
I should have missed those signs but for a strange warning." ... She
paused.

"_I_ would not be warned," I answered with a bitter sigh. "Tell me,
Madonna."

"It was when you left me in this room alone," she said, her exquisite
delicacy rendering her averse to recal, not the coercion she had
suffered, but the pain she knew I felt in so coercing her. "Dearest,"
she added with a sudden effort, "let me speak frankly, and dispel the
pain you feel while you think over it in silence."

I kissed the hand that clasped my own, and she went on, speaking with
intentional levity.

"Had a Chief forgotten?" tracing the outline of a star upon her bosom.
"Or did you think Clavelta's daughter had no share in the hereditary
gifts of her family?"

"But how did you unlock the springs?"

"Ah! those might have baffled me if you had trusted to them. You made
a double mistake when you left Enva on guard.... You don't think I
tempted her to disobey? Eager as I was for release, I could not have
been so doubly false. She did it unconsciously. It is time to put her
out of pain."

"Does she know me so little as to think I could mean to torture her by
suspense? Besides, even she must have seen that you had secured her
pardon."

"Or my own punishment," Eveena answered.

"Spare me such words, Eveena, unless you mean to make me yet more
ashamed of the compulsion I did employ. I never spoke, I never
thought"----

"Forgive me, dearest. Will it vex you to find how clearly your
flower-bird has learned to read your will through your eyes? When I
refused to obey, and you felt yourself obliged to compel, your first
momentary thought was to threaten, your next that I should not believe
you. When you laid your hand upon my shoulder, thus, it was no gesture
of anger or menace. You thought of the only promise I must believe,
and you dropped the thought as quickly as your hand. You would not
speak the word you might have to keep. Nay, dearest, what pains you
so? You gave me no pain, even when you called another to enforce your
command. Yet surely you know that _that_ must have t