table soul? Before I knew you,
life was a round of honorable duties and serene pleasures. I lived in my
profession, and found my greatest delight in its exercise. But now----"

"What now?" she asked.

"I seem"--he said, and the hard, cold selfishness that underlay all his
actions, however generous they may have been in appearance, was apparent
in his words and tones,--"I seem to forget every thing, even my standing
and fame as a lawyer, in the one fear that, although lost to me, you
will yet live to give yourself to another."

"If you fear that I shall ever be so weak as to give myself to Craik
Mansell," was her steady reply, "you have only to recall the promise I
made you when you undertook his case."

"Yes," said he, "but that was when you yourself believed him guilty."

"I know," she returned; "but if he were not good enough for me then, I
am not good enough for him now. Do you forget that I am blotted with a
stain that can never be effaced? When I stood up in court to-day and
denounced myself as guilty of crime, I signed away all my chances of
future happiness."

There was a pause; Mr. Orcutt seemed to be thinking. From the position
occupied by the two detectives his shadow could be seen oscillating to
and fro on the lawn, then, amid the hush of night--a deathly
hush--undisturbed, as Mr. Byrd afterward remarked, by so much as the
cracking of a twig, his voice rose quiet, yet vaguely sinister, in the
words:

"You have conquered. If any man suffers for this crime it shall not be
Craik Mansell, but----"

The sentence was never finished. Before the words could leave his mouth
a sudden strange and splitting sound was heard above their heads, then a
terrifying rush took place, and a great limb lay upon the walk where but
a moment before the beautiful form of Imogene Dare lifted itself by the
side of the eminent lawyer.

When a full sense of the terrible nature of the calamity which had just
occurred swept across the minds of the benumbed detectives, Mr. Byrd,
recalling the words and attitude of Imogene in face of a similar, if
less fatal, catastrophe at the hut, exclaimed under his breath:

"It is the vengeance of Heaven! Imogene Dare must have been more guilty
than we believed."

But when, after a superhuman exertion of strength, and the assistance of
many hands, the limb was at length raised, it was found that, although
both had been prostrated by its weight, only one remained stretched and
senseless upon