t with challenge for challenge and with eyes whose fires
were clearer than those of his own.

"You say you've regained your strength. Is that why you're afraid to
listen to me? Is that why you don't dare undergo my test?"

"Afraid to listen?" In spite of his fury he put his question with a
courteous gravity that was disconcerting. "Haven't I been listening? Am
I not still listening?"

But Anne was not to be deflected, and her clear-noted voice still rang
with the authority of conviction:

"You talk of holding your hand until you had 'retreated to the ditch or
wall,' or whatever your legal phrase was, yet you know that you don't
dare give your anger time to cool. You don't dare hold these men, who
are crying out for blood, quiet for twenty-four hours and spend that
time alone with your own conscience."

"And yet," he ventured to remind her, "I left Frankfort last night.
Before I started I reached my decision. There have been already more
than twenty-four hours, but they haven't cooled me except to make my
certainty greater."

"This boy whose face you just showed me brought word to Frankfort that
Saul Fulton was back to have you murdered," went on the girl with
unshaken steadiness. "The old instinct for vengeance swept you into
passion, but you didn't surrender to it then. You went to the
prosecutor. Why?"

"I've already told you. I tried the law first."

"Because yesterday you realized that this lawless way was the wrong way.
Your rebuff there maddened you still more. You came back, and when you
got here you were in doubt again. Isn't that true?"

"Not for long," he replied shortly.

"Yet you _were_ in doubt. Then you listened to the hot heads, and the
fever rose again in your veins. Tonight this boy was killed. One after
the other these things happened to work you up to a sort of frenzy and
keep you there. I've heard you tell how murder lords here used to hire
assassins and how they had to keep them keyed up with whiskey till the
work was done. Don't you see that you've been drinking a more dangerous
whiskey, and that you don't dare to let this vengeance wait, because you
know if you did, you couldn't face your own self-contempt?"

At first there had been despair in her heart because the face of the man
she thought she knew had been the face of a stranger, as unamenable to
change as that of the sphinx. But now she knew that if she could only
make him see in time what she had seen, she might succeed. He was