form of my deeply loved daughter.
What did I find? A funeral in the streets--hers--and Felix, your
brother, walking like a guard between her speechless corpse and the man
under whose protection I had placed her youth and innocence.

"Betrayed!" shrieked the now frenzied parent, rising on his pillow. "Her
innocence! Her sweetness! And he, cold as the stone we laid upon her
grave, had seen her perish with the anguish and shame of it, without a
sign of grief or a word of contrition."

"O God!" burst from lips the old man was watching with frenzied cunning.

"Ay, God!" repeated the father, shaking his head as if in defiance
before he fell back on his pillow. "He allowed it and I--But this does
not tell the story. I must keep to facts as Felix did--Felix, who was
but fifteen years old and yet found himself the only confidant and
solace of this young girl betrayed by her protector. It was after her
burial----"

"Cease!" cried a voice, smooth, fresh, and yet strangely commanding,
from over Thomas's shoulder. "Let me tell the rest. No man can tell the
rest as I can."

"Felix!" ejaculated Amos Cadwalader below his breath.

"Felix!" repeated Thomas, shaken to his very heart by this new presence.
But when he sought to rise, to turn, he felt the pressure of a hand on
his shoulder and heard that voice again, saying softly, but
peremptorily:

"Wait! Wait till you hear what I have to say. Think not of me, think
only of her. It is she you are called upon to avenge; your sister,
Evelyn."

Thomas yielded to him as he had to his father. He sank down beneath that
insistent hand, and his brother took up the tale.

"Evelyn had a voice like a bird. In those days before father's return,
she used to fill old John Poindexter's house with melody. I, who, as a
boy, was studious, rather than artistic, thought she sang too much for a
girl whose father was rotting away in a Southern prison. But when about
to rebuke her, I remembered Edward Kissam, and was silent. For it was
his love which made her glad, and to him I wished every happiness, for
he was good, and honest, and kind to me. She was eighteen then, and
beautiful, or so I was bound to believe, since every man looked at her,
even old John Poindexter, though he never looked at any other woman, not
even his own wife. And she was good, too, and pure, I swear, for her
blue eyes never faltered in looking into mine until one day when--my
God! how well I remember it!--they not only faltered