gave you, I would give it willingly."

"John!" said Peter Rathbawne, "I don't mean that. I've put the case
wrongly. Give me your counsel, not as Lieutenant-Governor, but as my
friend, and the man who loves my daughter!"

The Lieutenant-Governor raised his eyes from the finger-tips with which,
as the other was speaking, he had been plucking at the cloth.

"Fight them, Mr. Rathbawne," he said, "and may God help you--because I
can't!"

V

A BRAND FROM THE BURNING

More heartsick than he cared to confess, even to himself, the
Lieutenant-Governor left the Rathbawnes' earlier than his wont, despite
the fact that his host and Colonel Broadcastle were still engaged in
discussing the impending situation, and that Natalie, with a batch of
new music, was waiting for him at the piano. He pleaded an unusually
busy day and his consequent fatigue as an excuse, and so, at half after
nine, found himself about to light a second cigar, on the steps of the
Rathbawne residence, and shivering a little in the night air, which
stung the inside of his nostrils and set his eyes watering. Raw as the
day had been, it had turned colder now, but the night was superbly
clear. The sky seemed to have drawn nearer to the earth, and the stars
twinkled so sharply and clearly against its deep blue-black that they
resembled in form their conventionally five-pointed counterfeits of
silver paper. A brisk wind whirled a few dried leaves in whispering
eddies across the smooth asphaltum of the driveway, but beyond this and
the peevish sputtering of the arc-light on the opposite corner there was
no sound. It was the kind of night which, with its crystal clearness and
its steely intensity, stirs the normal pulse to keen exhilaration: yet
never had John Barclay felt more hopelessly dispirited, more utterly at
a loss to see the way before him. That anxiety, distress, possibly
actual disaster should be impending over this house where lay his heart,
his happiness, and his hope, was sufficiently disturbing in itself. That
he should not be able, despite his position, to raise a hand to avert
the calamity was worse. But that the battle was to be a battle for the
right, and yet, as it seemed, foredoomed from the start to end in
disaster, since no aid could be expected from the strong arm of the law
to which the partisans of principle turn naturally for support: this
was worst of all. For out of dangerous surroundings he felt himself able
to snatch away the