yes were curiously compelling.

"Good heavens! you don't mean that I've got to tell her!" Ormiston
cried.

He rose hurriedly, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked a
little unsteadily across to the window, crunching the shining pieces of
Mrs. Ormiston's sacrificial wine-glass under foot. Outside the night
was very wild. In the colourless sky stars reeled among the fleets of
racing cloud. The wind hissed up the grass slopes and shouted among the
great trees crowning the ridge of the hill. The prospect was not
calculated to encourage. Ormiston turned his back on it. But hardly
more encouraging was the sombre, gray-blue-walled room. The vision of
all that often returned to him afterwards in very different scenes--the
tall lamps, the two men, so strangely dissimilar in appearance and
temperament, sitting on either side the dinner-table with its fine
linen and silver, wines and fruits, waiting silently for him to speak.

"I can't tell her," he said, "I can't. Damn it all, I tell you, Knott,
I daren't. Think what it will be to her! Think of being told that about
your own child!" Ormiston lost control of himself. He spoke violently.
"I'm so awfully fond of her and proud of her," he went on. "She's
behaved so splendidly ever since Richard's death, laid hold of all the
business, never spared herself, been so able and so just. And now the
baby coming, and being a boy, seemed to be a sort of let up, a reward
to her for all her goodness. To tell her this horrible thing will be
like doing her some hideous wrong. If her heart has to be broken, in
common charity don't ask me to break it."

There was a pause. He came back to the table and stood behind Julius
March's chair.

"It's asking me to be hangman to my own sister," he said.

"Yes, I know it is a confoundedly nasty piece of work. And it's rough
on you, very rough. Only, you see, this hanging has to be put
through--there's the nuisance. And it is just a question whether your
hand won't be the lightest after all."

Again silence obtained, but for the rush and sob of the gale against
the great house.

"What do you say, Julius?" Ormiston demanded at last.

"I suppose our only thought is for Katherine--for Lady Calmady?" he
said. "And in that case I agree with Dr. Knott."

Roger took another turn to the window, stood there awhile struggling
with his natural desire to escape from so painful an embassy.

"Very well, if you are not here, Knott, I undertake to tell he