y would neither be missed, nor counted if they should
remain.

The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was
putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had
been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and
breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself
looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he
fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his
brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all
men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable
should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly,
and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt,
rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes
dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes,
striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his
mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a
dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples,
and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after
that, nothing.

* * * * *

A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he
awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the
window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his
watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled
himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her
shoulders to make her look up at him.

"Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?--Oh, my God! I am a
murderer--a murderer at last!"

She turned her face away quickly.

"Oh, no, no, boy!--not meaning to be!" she murmured.

"What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows--He
knows whether I meant it or not."

She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her,
he saw the dark eyes swimming.

"It was too hard; I shouldn't have asked it of you, Kenneth. I knew what
a cruel strain you've been under all these bad days. And there was no
harm done. I--I have been here a long time--ever since half-past eleven;
and I've been giving Mr. Galbraith his medicine. Now go down-stairs and
stretch out on the hall lounge. I'll run down and send you home as soon
as it stops raining."

XXXV

MARGERY'S ANSWER

"Well, it has come at