y what he had done and what was ahead
of him. He was twice a killer of men now, and each time the killing had
rid the earth of a snake. This last time it had been an exceedingly
good job. Even McDowell would concede that, and Miriam Kirkstone, on
her knees, would thank God for what he had done. But Canadian law did
not split hairs like its big neighbor on the south. It wanted him at
least for Kirkstone's killing if not for that of Kao, the Chinaman. No
one, not even Mary Josephine, would ever fully realize what he had
sacrificed for the daughter of the man who had ruined his father. For
Mary Josephine would never understand how deeply he had loved her.

It surprised him to find how naturally he fell back into his old habit
of discussing things with himself, and how completely and calmly he
accepted the fact that his home-coming had been but a brief and
wonderful interlude to his fugitivism. He did not know it at first, but
this calmness was the calmness of a despair more fatal than the menace
of the hangman.

"They won't catch me," he encouraged himself. "And she won't tell them
where I'm going. No, she won't do that." He found himself repeating
that thought over and over again. Mary Josephine would not betray him.
He repeated it, not as a conviction, but to fight back and hold down
another thought that persisted in forcing itself upon him. And this
thing, that at times was like a voice within him, cried out in its
moments of life, "She hates you--and she WILL tell where you are going!"

With each hour it was harder for him to keep that voice down; it
persisted, it grew stronger; in its intervals of triumph it rose over
and submerged all other thoughts in him. It was not his fear of her
betrayal that stabbed him; it was the underlying motive of it, the
hatred that would inspire it. He tried not to vision her as he had seen
her last, in the big chair, crushed, shamed, outraged--seeing in him no
longer the beloved brother, but an impostor, a criminal, a man whom she
might suspect of killing that brother for his name and his place in
life. But the thing forced itself on him. It was reasonable, and it was
justice.

"But she won't do it," he told himself. "She won't do it."

This was his fight, and its winning meant more to him than freedom. It
was Mary Josephine who would live with him now, and not Conniston. It
was her spirit that would abide with him, her voice he would hear in
the whispers of the night, her face he