e world said of you and your wild ways. For that blind
wilfulness I have been punished, as perhaps I deserved to be."

"Lies--all lies!" he stormed. "Those ways of mine--and God knows they
were none so wild, when all is said--I abandoned when I came to love
you. No lover since the world began was ever so cleansed, so purified,
so sanctified by love as was I."

"Spare me this at least!" she cried on a note of loathing

"Spare you?" he echoed. "What shall I spare you?"

"The shame of it all; the shame that is ever mine in the reflection that
for a season I believed I loved you."

He smiled. "If you can still feel shame, it shall overwhelm you ere I
have done. For you shall hear me out. Here there are none to interrupt
us, none to thwart my sovereign will. Reflect then, and remember.
Remember what a pride you took in the change you had wrought in me. Your
vanity welcomed that flattery, that tribute to the power of your beauty.
Yet, all in a moment, upon the paltriest grounds, you believed me the
murderer of your brother."

"The paltriest grounds?" she cried, protesting almost despite herself

"So paltry that the justices at Truro would not move against me."

"Because," she cut in, "they accounted that you had been sufficiently
provoked. Because you had not sworn to them as you swore to me that no
provocation should ever drive you to raise your hand against my brother.
Because they did not realize how false and how forsworn you were."

He considered her a moment. Then he took a turn on the terrace. Lionel
crouching ever by the rose-tree was almost entirely forgotten by him
now.

"God give me patience with you!" he said at length. "I need it. For I
desire you to understand many things this night. I mean you to see how
just is my resentment; how just the punishment that is to overtake you
for what you have made of my life and perhaps of my hereafter. Justice
Baine and another who is dead, knew me for innocent."

"They knew you for innocent?" There was scornful amazement in her tone.
"Were they not witnesses of the quarrel betwixt you and Peter and of
your oath that you would kill him?"

"That was an oath sworn in the heat of anger. Afterwards I bethought me
that he was your brother."

"Afterwards?" said she. "After you had murdered him?"

"I say again," Oliver replied calmly, "that I did not do this thing."

"And I say again that you lie."

He considered her for a long moment; then he laughed. "Have you ever