on and a hangman who led the chase.

The storm had begun anew, and out here in the darkness the cannonading
of thunder and wind swelled the chorus of pursuit. When the refugee
fell, he clawed and bit at the vines which had tripped him, in a fancied
battle of Laocooen, until at last he saw the coolness of water ahead of
him, and, dashing down the slope, hurled himself, shrieking, into its
stillness.

There his outcry ended. His spread fingers clutched at a liquid
emptiness and his fevered eyes showed once or twice briefly--and were
quenched.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The logs on the hearth leaped and crackled, spurting tongues of blue
flame, and after they had roared up to their fullest they slowly
subsided, until the shadows about the walls spread and encroached from
their corners toward the center of the room. The polish of furniture and
the bright angles of silver and bric-a-brac stood out with diminishing
high-lights. Hour by hour and minute by minute the faces of two unmoving
figures seated on a low and heavily cushioned couch grew less clear and
merged into the growing darkness.

Then the logs glowed only as embers against their bed of white ashes and
the table lamp burned on in single steadfastness.

Silence held the place, abandoned now by the furies, to the smile on two
unstirring faces. The gray of the east had begun to brighten into the
rose that comes ahead of the sun, when slowly, as if struggling under a
weight of pyramids the heavy lids of one of the faces fluttered. They
fluttered with no recognition as yet of the difference between death and
life, realizing only the burden of an immeasurable inertia.

Almost imperceptibly the currents of submerged vitality began to steal
back into the veins of Conscience Tollman.

For ages she seemed struggling through the heavy shades of coma, and
even after she was able to see her surroundings, it was without a
realization of their significance.

She sat studying with an impersonal gaze the quiet figure at her side,
looking even at her own hand resting upon its shoulder with the same
absence of interest that she might have felt for another hand and
another shoulder.

But about the time that the sun came over the eastern skyline,
dissipating the mistiness of dawn into the birth of a new day, she
crossed the line between the palpable and impalpable, and her brain
began to awaken to the need of battle with this lethargy.

The unmoving figure at her side was n