d not to be even heart beats in the tense silence while Kate
sat with her eyes downcast, clinking, with her jewelled fingers, a bit
of ice against the sides of her drinking glass. Even when she spoke
finally she did not look up, but began in a low, even voice:

"A fable that I read long ago keeps coming to me to-night--the story of a
king, powerful and cruel, who, when his time came to appear before the
Great Judge, the single entry in his favor that the Recording Angel
could find was the whim which had induced him when walking one day to
have a pig that he saw suffering in the gutter put out of its misery.

"The story is applicable in that as I sit here I realize that in all the
years I have been among you there is only one," she raised her eyes and
indicated Teeters's empty chair, "who ever has done me the smallest
disinterested kindness.

"Until I got beyond the need of it, I cannot remember one unselfish,
friendly act, or, at a time when every man's hand was against me, one
sympathetic word or look. It sounds incredible, but it is the truth. It
seems the irony of Fate indeed that this decision, which means so much
to you, should rest with me."

She stopped and lowered her eyes again to the glass which she twirled
slowly as she deliberated, as if choosing the words which should most
exactly express her thoughts.

She began again:

"You will excuse me if I speak much of myself, but there is no other way
to make clear what I have to say." She paused for a breathless moment,
and went on: "We all have our peculiarities of temperament and mind,
our individual idiosyncracies, to distinguish us, and they are as marked
as physical characteristics, and it happens to be mine that either a
kindness or an injury is something to be paid in full as surely as a
promissory note, if it is possible to do so.

"The debts I owe to you are for acts of wanton cruelty that one would
have to look to Indians to find their counterpart, for deliberate
insults that had not even the excuse of personal animus to justify them,
but were due solely to the cowardice which likes to strike where it is
safe--the eagerness to hurt, which seems to be the first instinct of
small minds and natures. I have no taste to rehearse my grievances, but
it is necessary, that you may quite understand why it is that I feel as
I do towards you."

Somewhat in the tone of a person reciting a lesson she continued:

"I was a young girl when I first came among you