. All this is part of him--as much a part of him as the cowardice and
the trickery. So I don't really care if he is a liar and a coward. I
ought to, I suppose. But at the bottom of my heart I admire him. He has
made something; he has created these beautiful books, and they will be
here when we are all dead. He doesn't leave the world just as he found
it. That is the only real cowardice, I think--especially as I am going
to do it----"

And later she said, belligerently: "If I had been a man I could have at
least assassinated somebody who was prominent. I do wish Rudolph was
not such a stick-in-the-mud. And I wish I liked Rudolph better. But on
the whole I prefer the physical coward to the moral one. Rudolph simply
bores me stiff with his benevolent airs. He just walks around the place
forgiving me sixty times to the hour, and if he doesn't stop it I am
going to slap him."

Thus Patricia.

IX

The world knows how Charteris was killed in Fairhaven by Jasper
Hardress--the husband of "that flighty Mrs. Hardress" Anne had spoken
of.

"And I hardly know," said Mrs. Ashmeade, "whether more to admire the
justice or the sardonic humor of the performance. Here after hundreds of
entanglements with women, John Charteris manages to be shot by a jealous
maniac on account of a woman with whom--for a wonder--his relations were
proven to be innocent. The man needed killing, but it is asking too much
of human nature to put up with his being made a martyr of."

She cried a little, though. "It--it's because I remember him when he was
turning out his first mustache," she explained, lucidly.

* * * * *

But with the horror and irony of John Charteris's assassination the
biographer of Rudolph Musgrave has really nothing to do save in so far
as this event influenced the life of Rudolph Musgrave.

It was on the day of Charteris's death--a fine, clear afternoon in late
September--that Rudolph Musgrave went bass-fishing with some eight of
his masculine guests. Luncheon was brought to them in a boat about two
o'clock, along with the day's mail.

"I say--! But listen, everybody!" cried Alfred Chayter, whose mail
included a morning paper--the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_, in fact.

He read aloud.

"I wish I could be with Anne," thought Colonel Musgrave. "It may be I
could make things easier."

But Anne was in Lichfield now....

He had just finished dressing for supper when it occurred to him that