ve forth clear, musical clicks. "Do you see?"
said the San Reve half wistfully. "I have this!"

"You would not kill Miss Harley!" exclaimed Storri nervously.

"No! Storri, no!"

"Whom then?" and Storri moistened his dry lips. His San Reve was such a
heathen! The thought parched him. "Whom would you kill, my San Reve?"
This came off pleadingly.

"Whom would I kill?" the San Reve repeated tenderly, stretching for a
kiss. "I would kill you! No, not now, my Storri; but some time. My
resolution is only born; it is not yet grown. Storri, you must beware! I
come of the race that kill! I have now only the tiny root of that blood
resolution. Do not let us nourish it! We must destroy it--blight it with
much love! I speak for you, for me!" The San Reve began to cry
convulsively. "I speak against a dark day! I feel, I know it! It is you,
you whom I shall kill! And then myself--oh, yes, my Storri, you cannot
go alone!"

The San Reve threw herself weeping upon the couch; her gusty nature
seemed torn by whirlwinds of passion and jealous love. Storri hung in
the door, and the white of his cravat was not so white as his face. He
could neither go nor stay, neither speak nor do; craven to the heart, he
quailed before the stormy San Reve. An artist might have painted him as
the Genius of Cowardice.

"Good-night, my Storri," said the San Reve, her voice mournfully sweet.

CHAPTER XIV

HOW THEY TALKED POLITICS AT MR. GWYNN's

In accord with the requests of Mr. Gwynn, which with them had those
graver aspects the requests of royalty possess for London shopkeepers,
the President and General Attorney of the Anaconda Airline came to
Washington. The Anaconda president was a short, corpulent man, with dark
skin, eyes black as beads, round, alert face, and a nose like the ace of
clubs. The General Attorney was no taller than his superior officer, but
differed from him in a figure so spare and starved that it snapped its
fingers at description. As though to make amends for a niggardliness of
the physical, Providence had conferred upon our legal one a prodigious
head. A facetious opponent once said that he had a seven and a half hat
and a six and a half belt, being, as steamboat folk would put it,
over-engined for his beam. Both the President and the General Attorney
were devoted to their company, and neither would have scrupled to loot
an orphanage or burn a church had such drastic measure been demanded by
Anaconda interests. Once