ed courage to
proceed further.

"I 'm going to get up," he announced, at the end of some five minutes.

"No, you 're not. You are going to stay right where you are."

"What right have you to keep me here?" he demanded.

"The right of being stronger than you."

Arsdale struggled feebly to his elbow, but Donaldson pushed him back
with a pressure that would not have made a child waver. He stood
beside him wondering just how much the dulled brain was able to grasp.
The long night had left him with little sympathy. The more he had
thought of that blow, the greater the aversion he felt towards Arsdale.
If the boy had n't struck her he would feel some pity for him, but that
blow given in the dark against a defenseless woman--the one woman who
had been faithful and kind to him--that was too much. It had raised
dark thoughts there in the night.

Arsdale, his pupils contracted to a pin-point, stared back at him. Yet
his questions proved that he was now possessed of a certain amount of
intelligence. If he was able to realize that he was in a strange
place, he might be able to realize some other things that Donaldson was
determined he _should_.

"You are n't very clear-headed yet, but can you understand what I am
saying to you now?"

Arsdale nodded weakly.

"Do you remember anything of what you did yesterday?" he demanded, in a
vibrant voice that engraved each word upon the sluggish brain.

"No," answered the man quailing.

"No? Then I'll tell you. You came back to the house and you struck
your sister."

"No! No! Not that! I didn't do that."

Donaldson responded to a new hope. This seemed to prove that the
conscience of the man was not dead. It came to him as a relief. He
was relentless, not out of hate, but because so much depended upon
establishing the fact that the fellow still had a soul.

"Yes. You did," he repeated, his fingers unconsciously closing into
his palms. "You struck her down."

"Good God!"

"Think of that a while and then I 'll tell you more."

"Is she hurt, is she badly hurt?"

Without replying Donaldson returned to his chair on the opposite side
of the bed and watched him as a physician might after injecting a
medicine. Arsdale stared back at him in dumb terror. Donaldson could
almost see the gruesome pictures which danced witch-like through his
disordered brain. He did n't enjoy the torture, but he must know just
how much he had upon which to work.

It was in the earl