him hyar, like old Sim Roxby axed me ter do, an' that's all. I
ain't keerin' ef I never lay eyes on him again," he said to himself.

"Going?" said Dundas, pleasantly, noticing the motion. "You'll look in
again, won't you?"

"Wunst in a while, I reckon," drawled Keenan, a trifle thrown off his
balance by this courtesy.

He paused at the door, looking back over his shoulder for a moment at
the illumined room, then stepped out into the night, leaving the tenant
of the lonely old house filling his pipe by the fire.

His tread rang along the deserted gallery, and sudden echoes came
tramping down the vacant halls as if many a denizen of the once populous
place was once more astir within its walls. Long after Dundas had heard
him spring from the lower piazza to the ground, and the rusty gate clang
behind him, vague footfalls were audible far away, and were still again,
and once more a pattering tread in some gaunt and empty apartment near
at hand, faint and fainter yet, till he hardly knew whether it were the
reverberations of sound or fancy that held his senses in thrall.

And when all was still and silent at last he felt less solitary than
when these elusive tokens of human presence were astir.

Late, late he sat over the dwindling embers. His mind, no longer
diverted by the events of the day, recurred with melancholy persistence
to a theme which even they, although fraught with novelty and presage
of danger, had not altogether crowded out. And as the sense of peril
dulled, the craft of sophistry grew clumsy. Remorse laid hold upon him
in these dim watches of the night. Self-reproach had found him out here,
defenceless so far from the specious wiles and ways of men. All the line
of provocations seemed slight, seemed naught, as he reviewed them and
balanced them against a human life. True, it was not in some mad quarrel
that his skill had taken it and had served to keep his own--a duel, a
fair fight, strictly regular according to the code of "honorable men"
for ages past--and he sought to argue that it was doubtless but the
morbid sense of the wild fastnesses without, the illimitable vastness
of the black night, the unutterable indurability of nature to the
influences of civilization, which made it taste like murder. He had
brought away even from the scene of action, to which he had gone with
decorous deliberation--his worldly affairs arranged for the possibility
of death, his will made, his volition surrendered, and his