y is removed, but as far as she is
concerned, the truth must still be concealed for Clemency's sake. It
must not be known that that dead man was her father, and the very
instant we let go one thread of the mystery the whole fabric will
unravel. Poor Clara can never be acknowledged openly as my wife, the
best and most patient wife a man ever had, and under a heavier sentence
of death this moment than the utmost ingenuity of man could contrive."
Gordon groaned, and let his head sink upon his hands.

"She told me some time ago that she was ill," James said pityingly.

"Ill? She has been upon the executioner's block for years. It is not
illness; that is too tame a word for it. It is torture, prolonged as
only the evil forces of Nature herself can prolong it."

Gordon rose and shook himself angrily. "I am keeping her now almost
constantly under morphine," he said. "She has suffered more lately. The
attacks have been more frequent. There has never been the slightest
possibility of a surgical operation. From the very first it was utterly
hopeless, and if it had been the dog there, I should have put a bullet
through his head and considered myself a friend." Gordon gazed with
miserable reflection at the dog. "I am glad that the _direct_ cause of
that man's death was not what it might have been," he said.

He shook himself again as a dog shakes off water. He laughed a miserable
laugh. "Well," he said, "Clemency is free now. She can go her ways as
she will. You see she resembled her mother so closely that I had to
guard her from even the sight of her father. He would have known the
truth at once. Clemency is free, but I have paid an awful price for her
freedom and for your life. If I had not done what you doubtless know I
did that night, you would have been shot, and it would have been a
struggle between myself and her father, with the very good chance of my
being killed, and Clara and the girl left defenseless. His revolver
carried six deaths in it. It would all have depended upon the quickness
of the dog, and I should have left too much hanging upon that."

"I don't see what else you could do," James said in a low voice. He was
pale himself. He did not blame Gordon. He felt that he himself, in
Gordon's place, would have done as he had done, and yet he felt as if
faced close to a horror of murder and death, and he knew from the look
upon the other man's countenance that it was the same with him.

"I saw no other way," Gordon