at spot one of Stygian murk, and even the moon hid its face just
then, so that the world went black, and the stars seemed more brilliant
against their inky velvet. But the light had held until the grim
preparations were finished, and then when Bas Rowlett had taken his
appointed place, tethered and wearing the hempen loop, when the other
end of the long line had been passed through the broken slat of the
closed window shutters, where it would be held by many hands in
assurance against escape, Sim Squires kept his promise.

His followers trooped callously back into the house and he himself
remained there, on watch, only until with the stiffness of a sleep
walker Dorothy Thornton appeared for a moment in the open door and came
slowly to the foot of the tree.

She could scarcely see the two men shrouded there in the profundity of
shadow, and she had almost walked into the one who was to die before she
realized his nearness and drew back shuddering.

Then Sim, who was holding the loose end of the rope so that it would not
slacken too freely, put it in her hand and, as their fingers touched,
found it icy.

"Ye'll hev ter take hold of this," he directed, "we've got t'other end
indoors. When ye're ready for us--or should he seek ter git away--jest
give hit a tight jerk or two. We won't interfere with ye ner come out
till we gits thet signal--but don't suffer him ter parley overlong."

Then the man left her, and the woman found herself standing there in the
darkness with a terrible sense of Death hovering at her shoulder.

For a moment neither spoke, and Dorothy Thornton lifted her eyes to the
tree from which had always emanated an influence of peace. She needed
that message of peace now. She looked at the dark human figure, robbed
of its menace, robbed of all its own paltry arrogance, and the furies
that had torn her ebbed and subsided into a sickness of contemptuous
pity.

Then the cloud drifted away from the moon and the world stood again out
of darkness into silvery light; the breeze that had brought that
brightening brought, too, a low wailing voice from high overhead, where
the walnut tree seemed to sob with some poignant suffering; seemed to
strive for the articulate voice that nature had denied it.

That monument to honoured dead could never shed its hallowed spirit of
peace again if once it had been outraged with the indignities of a
gibbet! If once it bore, instead of its own sweetly wholesome produce,
that d