sed and embarrassed at
this crowning incongruity, her pretty lips trembled between a smile and
a cry as she said, "Good-night," and slipped away into the darkness.

Erect and grotesque De Ferrieres retained the same attitude until the
sound of her footsteps was lost, when he slowly began to close the
door. But a strong arm arrested it from without, and a large carpeted
foot appeared at the bottom of the narrowing opening. The door yielded,
and Mr. Abner Nott entered the room.

IV.

With an exclamation and a hurried glance around him, De Ferrieres threw
himself before the intruder. But slowly lifting his large hand, and
placing it on his lodger's breast, he quietly overbore the sick man's
feeble resistance with an impact of power that seemed almost as moral
as it was physical. He did not appear to take any notice of the room or
its miserable surroundings; indeed, scarcely of the occupant. Still
pushing him, with abstracted eyes and immobile face, to the chair that
Rosey had just quitted, he made him sit down, and then took up his own
position on the pile of cushions opposite. His usually underdone
complexion was of watery blueness; but his dull, abstracted glance
appeared to exercise a certain dumb, narcotic fascination on his
lodger.

"I mout," said Nott, slowly, "hev laid ye out here on sight, without
enny warnin', or dropped ye in yer tracks in Montgomery Street,
wherever there was room to work a six-shooter in comf'ably? Johnson, of
Petaluny--him, ye know, ez hed a game eye--fetched Flynn comin' outer
meetin' one Sunday, and it was only on account of his wife, and she a
second-hand one, so to speak. There was Walker, of Contra Costa,
plugged that young Sacramento chap, whose name I disremember, full o'
holes jest ez he was sayin' 'Good-by' to his darter. I mout hev done
all this if it had settled things to please me. For while you and Flynn
and that Sacramento chap ez all about the same sort o' men, Rosey's a
different kind from their sort o' women."

"Mademoiselle is an angel!" said De Ferrieres, suddenly rising, with an
excess of extravagance. "A saint! Look! I cram the lie, ha! down his
throat who challenges it."

"Ef by mam'selle ye mean my Rosey," said Nott, quietly laying his
powerful hands on De Ferrieres' shoulders, and slowly pinning him down
again upon his chair, "ye're about right, though she ain't mam'selle
yet. Ez I was sayin', I might hev killed you off-hand ef I hed thought
it would hev been