ight. I
thought it was my letter to you."

Her eyes had a sudden absent look. It was as though she were speaking
in a trance. "I answered that letter--your letter. I answered it this
morning. Here is the answer ... here." She laid a letter on the table
before him, then drew it back again into her lap. "Now it does not
matter. But it gives me no chance...."

There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice. Her face was wan
and strained. "No chance, no chance," she whispered.

"Rudyard did not kill him?" she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a
moment, as though repeating a lesson. "Why?"

"I stopped him. I prevented him."

"You prevented him--why?" Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion
and trouble. "Why did you prevent it--you?"

"That would have hurt you--the scandal, the grimy press, the world."

Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous poignancy.
"It would have hurt me--yes. Why did you not want to hurt me?"

He did not answer. His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to
steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon of
steel which Rudyard had given him. It produced some strange, malignant
effect on his mind. Everything seemed to stop in him, and he was
suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same region
where Rudyard had been. It was the region of the abnormal. In it one
moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward things,
numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one's own agony, which seems
to neutralize the universe and reduce all life's problems to one
formula of solution.

"What did you say to him that stopped him?" she asked in a whisper of
awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would
speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.

"I said the one thing to say," he answered after a moment,
involuntarily laying the pistol on the table before him--doing it, as
it were, without conscious knowledge.

It fascinated Jasmine, the ugly, deadly little vehicle of oblivion. Her
eyes fastened on it, and for an instant stared at it transfixed; then
she recovered herself and spoke again.

"What was the one thing to say?" she whispered.

"That you were innocent--absolutely, that--"

Suddenly she burst into wild laughter--shrill, acrid, cheerless,
hysterical, her face turned upward, her hands clasped under her chin,
her body shaking with what was not laughter, but the terrifying
agitat