pile of
logs, stacked there in readiness for the fires of a long winter.

"Look!" he said, throwing open the half door of a cattle shed behind
the timber. "They found her here on the second of August, a Sunday
morning, just before the people went to early mass. By her side was a
bottle labeled 'Poison.' She bought it in Zermatt on the sixth of
July. So, you see, my little girl had been thinking a whole month of
killing herself. Poor child! What a month! They tell me, Herr Baron,
you left Zermatt on the sixth of July?"

Bower's face had grown cold and gray while the old man was speaking.
He began to understand. Stampa would spare him none of the horror of
the tragedy from which he fled like a lost soul when the news of it
reached the hotel. Well, he would not draw back now. If Stampa and he
were destined to have a settlement, why defer it? This was his day of
reckoning,--of atonement, he hoped,--and he would not shirk the
ordeal, though his flesh quivered and his humbled pride lashed him
like a whip.

The squalid stable was peculiarly offensive. Owing to the gale, the
cattle that ought to be pasturing in the high alp were crowded there
in reeking filth. Yesterday, not long before this hour, he was humming
verses of cow songs to Helen, and beguiling the way to the Forno with
a recital of the customs and idyls of the hills. What a spiteful thing
was Fate! Why had this doting peasant risen from the dead to drag him
through the mire of a past transgression? If Stampa betrayed anger,
if his eyes and voice showed the scorn and hatred of a man justly
incensed because of his daughter's untimely death, the situation would
be more tolerable. But his words were mild, biting only by reason of
their simple pathos. He spoke in a detached manner. He might be
relating the unhappy story of some village maid of whom he had no
personal knowledge. This complete self effacement grated on Bower's
nerves. It almost spurred him again to ungovernable rage. But he
realized the paramount need of self control. He clenched his teeth in
the effort to bear his punishment without protest.

And Stampa seemed to have the gift of divination. He read Bower's
heart. By some means he became aware that the unsavory shed was
loathsome to the fine gentleman standing beside him.

"Etta was always so neat in her dress that it must have been a
dreadful thing to see her laid there," he went on. "She fell just
inside the door. Before she drank the poison she m