the
old ball-room. Milli-cent had lighted her candle as she searched for the
fugitive's quarters; she was passing down the length of the old house
on the second story, and suddenly she emerged upon the gallery. She
shielded the feeble flicker with her Hand; her white-hooded head gleamed
as with an aureola as the divergent rays rested on the opaque mist; and
now and again she clutched the baluster and walked with tremulous care,
for the flooring was rotten here and there, and ready to crumble away.
Her face was pallid, troubled; and Dundas, who had been warned by the
tramp of horses and the tread of men, and who had descended the stairs,
revolver in hand, ready to slip away if he might under cover of
the mist, paused appalled, gazing across the quadrangle as on an
apparition--the sight so familiar to his senses, so strange to his
experience. He saw in an abrupt shifting of the mist that there were
other figures skulking in doorways, watching her progress. The next
moment she leaned forward to clutch the baluster, and the light of the
candle fell full on Emory Keenan, lurking in the open passage. A sudden
sharp cry of "Surrender!" The young mountaineer, confused, swiftly drew
his pistol. Others were swifter still. A sharp report rang out into
the chill crisp air, rousing all the affrighted echoes--a few faltering
steps, a heavy fall, and for a long time Emory Keenan's life-blood
stained the floor of the promenade. Even when it had faded, the rustic
gossips came often and gazed at the spot with morbid interest, until, a
decade later, an enterprising proprietor removed the floor and altered
the shape of that section of the building out of recognition.

The escape of Dundas was easily effected. The deputy sheriff, confronted
with the problem of satisfactorily accounting for the death of a man
who had committed no offence against public polity, was no longer
formidable. His errand had been the arrest of a horse-thief, well-known
to him, and he had no interest in pursuing a fugitive, however obnoxious
to the law, whose personal description was so different from that of the
object of his search.

Time restored to Dundas his former place in life and the esteem of his
fellow-citizens. His stay in the mountains was an episode which he will
not often recall, but sometimes volition fails, and he marvels at the
strange fulfilment of the girl's vision; he winces to think that her
solicitude for his safety should have cost her her lov