ck to 'Elm Bluff' that night, after I
met you in the pine woods?"

His dark face was close to hers, and his keen blue eyes seemed to probe
the recesses of her soul. If she answered, would the steel springs of
some trap close upon her?

"I did not go back to 'Elm Bluff.' My hands, my heart, my soul are as
free from crime as they were when God sent them into the world. I am
innocent--innocent--innocent as any baby only a week old, lying dead in
its little coffin. Innocent--but defiled, disgraced; innocent as the
Lord Jesus was of the sins for which He died; but you can not save what
you have destroyed. You have ruined my life."

He was a strong man, cold, collected, priding himself upon his superb
physique, his nerves of steel; but as he watched and listened, he
trembled, and the girl's eyes dilated, sparkled through the sudden
moisture that so strangely and unexpectedly gathered in his own.

"Then you must prove the truth of your solemn words; and it was this
faint hope that induced me to come here to-day. Only one circumstance
stands between the Grand Jury and your indictment for murder; and time
presses. Now tell me, do you know this?"

He took from his coat pocket a small parcel wrapped in paper, and tore
off the covering. Beryl stood faint and dizzy, resting against the
window, but erect, on guard and defiant. He shook out and held up a
square of fine linen, daintily hem-stitched. Along the border ran
graceful arabesques, swelling into scallops and dotted with stars,
embroidered in some rich red thread; and in one corner, enclosed in a
wreath of exquisitely designed fuchsias, the large, elaborately ornate
capitals "B. B." were worked in fadeless scarlet scrolls to match the
wreath. Above the drooping flowers, poised the red wings of a
descending butterfly. Artistic instincts had outlined, and deft
delicate touches filled in, with the glowing embroidery.

Did she know it? Could she ever forget that serene May day when the air
was liquid gold, and the Mediterranean molten sapphire, wreathed with
pearls, as the wavelets crested; when the rosy oleanders and silvery
flakes of orange blossoms floated down upon the ferny cliff, where
sitting by her father's side, she had drawn this design, spreading the
linen on the back of her father's worn copy of Theocritus? If she lived
a thousand years, would it be possible to forget the thin, almost
transparent white hand, with its blue veins swollen like cords, which
had gentl