otionless with
head raised there was something ominous, animal-like, almost wolfish.

As he stood a call suddenly came from the garden. It was the call of an
owl, a white owl that rose on the sound and flitted softly as a moth
across the trees to the garden beyond.

Silas turned away from the gate and came back down the street towards his
hotel, arrived there he went straight to his room and to bed.

But he did not go to sleep. His head was full of plans, the craziest and
maddest plans. Pinckney he had quite dismissed from his mind, the
consciousness of having committed a vile action in drawing a knife upon an
unarmed man was with him, and the knowledge that the consequences might
include his expulsion from Charleston society, but all that instead of
sobering him made him more reckless. He would have Phyl despite the Devil
himself. He would seize her and carry her off, trap her like a bird.

He determined on the morrow to return early to Grangersons and think
things out.

CHAPTER II

Whilst he was lying in bed thinking things out, the folk at Vernons were
retiring to rest.

Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and
Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three
persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and
in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed
to say nothing.

Calhoun was for publishing the affair.

"The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same
thing again to some one and succeed and swing."

"I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the
moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything
into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against
him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel--
He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a
child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and
I don't want to push the thing against him."

"I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl.

She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they
recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by
the Devil.

They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it
will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that
comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight