ou speak, Marsh?" asked Gilmore.

"No," said Langham in a whisper.

Gilmore laughed.

"You are seeing just how it all happened, Marsh. There was a sledge by
the anvil that stood near those scales, and when the old fellow wouldn't
come to time, my man lost all restraint and snatched it up, and a second
later McBride was dead. After that my man had things all his own way. He
went through the safe and took what was useful to him,--and those damn
bonds of North's which weren't useful,--and skipped by the side door and
out over the shed roof and down the alley, just as Joe said."

Gilmore paused, and flicked away a bit of cigar ash that had lodged in a
crease of his coat.

"That's the whole story of the McBride murder. Now what do you think of
my theorizing, Marsh; how does it strike you?"

But Langham did not answer him. The gambler's words had brought it all
back; he was living again the agony of that first conscious moment when
he realized the thing he had done. He remembered his hurried search for
the money, and his flight through the side door; he remembered crossing
the shed roof and the panic that had seized him as he dropped into the
alley beyond, unseen, safe as he supposed. A debilitating reaction, such
as follows some tremendous physical effort, had quickly succeeded. He
had wandered through the deserted streets seeking control of himself in
vain. Finally he had gone home. Evelyn was at his father's and the
servant absent for the day. He had let himself in with his latchkey and
had gone at once to the library. There he fell to pacing to and fro;
ten--twenty minutes had passed, when the sudden noisy clamor of the town
bell had taken him, cowering, to the window; but the world beyond was a
vaguely curtained white.

He raised his heavy bloodshot eyes and looked into the gambler's smiling
face. He realized the futility of his act, since it had placed him
irrevocably in Gilmore's power. He had endured unspeakable anguish all
to no purpose, since Gilmore knew; knew with the certitude of an
eye-witness. And there the gambler sat smiling and at ease, torturing
him with his cunning speech.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LOVE THAT ENDURES

A melancholy wind raked the bare hills which rose beyond the flats, and
found its way across half the housetops in Mount Hope to the solitary
window that gave light and air to John North's narrow cell. For seven
long days, over the intervening housetops, he had been observing those