rched honour and his word must carry some
weight. But now none would believe him. They would argue from his
silence and from his having suffered his brother to be unjustly accused
that he was craven-hearted and dishonourable, and that if he had acted
thus it was because he had no good defence to offer for his deed.
Not only would he be irrevocably doomed, but he would be doomed with
ignominy, he would be scorned by all upright men and become a thing of
contempt over whose end not a tear would be shed.

Thus he came to the dread conclusion that in his endeavours to screen
himself he had but enmeshed himself the more inextricably. If Oliver but
spoke he was lost. And back he came to the question: What assurance had
he that Oliver would not speak?

The fear of this from occurring to him occasionally began to haunt him
day and night, and for all that the fever had left him and his wound was
entirely healed, he remained pale and thin and hollow-eyed. Indeed
the secret terror that was in his soul glared out of his eyes at every
moment. He grew nervous and would start up at the least sound, and he
went now in a perpetual mistrust of Oliver, which became manifest in a
curious petulance of which there were outbursts at odd times.

Coming one afternoon into the dining-room, which was ever Sir
Oliver's favourite haunt in the mansion of Penarrow, Lionel found his
half-brother in that brooding attitude, elbow on knee and chin on palm,
staring into the fire. This was so habitual now in Sir Oliver that it
had begun to irritate Lionel's tense nerves; it had come to seem to him
that in this listlessness was a studied tacit reproach aimed at himself.

"Why do you sit ever thus over the fire like some old crone?" he
growled, voicing at last the irritability that so long had been growing
in him.

Sir Oliver looked round with mild surprise in his glance. Then from
Lionel his eyes travelled to the long windows.

"It rains," he said.

"It was not your wont to be driven to the fireside by rain. But rain or
shine 'tis ever the same. You never go abroad."

"To what end?" quoth Sir Oliver, with the same mildness, but a wrinkle
of bewilderment coming gradually between his dark brows. "Do you suppose
I love to meet lowering glances, to see heads approach one another so
that confidential curses of me may be muttered?"

"Ha!" cried Lionel, short and sharp, his sunken eyes blazing suddenly.
"It has come to this, then, that having voluntarily