ling now in his tone and manner that
it drove her to realize that some revelation was impending. She was
conscious of a faint excitement, a reflection perhaps of the wild
excitement that was astir in him.

"Your brother," he began, "met his death at the hands of a false
weakling whom I loved, towards whom I had a sacred duty. Straight from
the deed he fled to me for shelter. A wound he had taken in the struggle
left that trail of blood to mark the way he had come." He paused, and
his tone became gentler, it assumed the level note of one who reasons
impassively. "Was it not an odd thing, now, that none should ever
have paused to seek with certainty whence that blood proceeded, and to
consider that I bore no wound in those days? Master Baine knew it, for
I submitted my body to his examination, and a document was drawn up and
duly attested which should have sent the Queen's pursuivants back to
London with drooping tails had I been at Penarrow to receive them."

Faintly through her mind stirred the memory that Master Baine had urged
the existence of some such document, that in fact he had gone so far as
to have made oath of this very circumstance now urged by Sir Oliver; and
she remembered that the matter had been brushed aside as an invention of
the justice's to answer the charge of laxity in the performance of his
duty, particularly as the only co-witness he could cite was Sir Andrew
Flack, the parson, since deceased. Sir Oliver's voice drew her attention
from that memory.

"But let that be," he was saying. "Let us come back to the story itself.
I gave the craven weakling shelter. Thereby I drew down suspicion upon
myself, and since I could not clear myself save by denouncing him, I
kept silent. That suspicion drew to certainty when the woman to whom I
was betrothed, recking nothing of my oaths, freely believing the very
worst of me, made an end of our betrothal and thereby branded me a
murderer and a liar in the eyes of all. Indignation swelled against me.
The Queen's pursuivants were on their way to do what the justices of
Truro refused to do.

"So far I have given you facts. Now I give you surmise--my own
conclusions--but surmise that strikes, as you shall judge, the very
bull's-eye of truth. That dastard to whom I had given sanctuary, to whom
I had served as a cloak, measured my nature by his own and feared that
I must prove unequal to the fresh burden to be cast upon me. He feared
lest under the strain of it I sh