th his
pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows
over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the
past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder
in his heart, bitterness and repentance were his.

He was a changed man. Never again could he be the old self. "But the
blow--the blow," he kept saying, "I thought it would fall on me--not
on her--my beautiful one--not on a Conway woman's chastity--not my
wife's daughter--"

He heard steps coming down the path. His heart ceased a moment, it
seemed to him, and then beat wildly. He drew a long breath to relieve
it--to calm it with cool oxygen, and then he cocked the five chambered
pistol and waited as full of the joy of killing as if the man who was
now walking down the path was a wolf or a mad dog--down the path and
right into the muzzle of the pistol, backed by the arm which could kill.

He saw Richard Travis coming, slowly, painfully, his left arm tied up,
and his step, once so quick and active, so full of strength and life,
now was as if the blight of old age had come upon it.

In spite of his bitter determination Conway noticed the great change,
and instinct, which acts even through anger and hatred and revenge and
the maddening fury of murder,--instinct, the ever present--whispered its
warning to his innermost ear.

Still, he could not resist. Rising, he threw his pistol up within a few
yards of Richard Travis's breast, his hand upon the trigger. But he
could not fire, although Travis stood quietly under its muzzle and
looked without surprise into his face.

Conway glanced along the barrel of his weapon and into the face of
Richard Travis. And then he brought his pistol down with a quick
movement.

The face before him was begging him to shoot!

"Why don't you shoot?" said Travis at last, breaking the silence and
in a tone of disappointment.

"Because you are not guilty," said Conway--"not with that look in
your face."

"I am sorry you saw my face, then," he smiled sadly--"for it had been
such a happy solution for it all--if you had only fired."

"Where is my child?"

"Do you think you have any right to ask--having treated her as you
have?"

Conway trembled, at first with rage, then in shame:

"No,"--he said finally. "No, you are right--I haven't."

"That is the only reply you could have made me that would make it
obligatory on my part to answer your question. In that reply I see
there is