ips are parted, but she never speaks. There was
a way that she had with her hands, holding them one within the other,
thus"--

I stopped him with a cry for silence, and I leaned trembling against the
table. "Thou wretch!" I cried. "Thou art her murderer!"

He raised his head and looked beyond me with that strange, faint smile.
"I know," he replied, with the dignity which was his at times. "You may
play the headsman, if you choose. I dispute not your right. But it is
scarce worth while. I have taken poison."

The sunshine came into the room, and the wind from the river, and the
trumpet notes of swans flying to the north. "The George is ready for
sailing," he said at last. "To-morrow or the next day she will be going
home with the tidings of this massacre. I shall go with her, and within
a week they will bury me at sea. There is a stealthy, slow, and secret
poison.... I would not die in a land where I have lost every throw of
the dice, and I would not die in England for Buckingham to come and look
upon my face, and so I took that poison. For the man upon the floor,
there,--prison and death awaited him at home. He chose to flee at once."

He ceased to speak, and sat with his head bowed upon his breast. "If you
are content that it should be as it is," he said at length, "perhaps you
will leave me? I am not good company to-day."

His hand was busy again with the letter upon the table, and his gaze
was fixed beyond me. "I have lost," he muttered. "How I came to play
my cards so badly I do not know. The stake was heavy,--I have not
wherewithal to play again."

His head sank upon his outstretched arm. As for me, I stood a minute
with set lips and clenched hands, and then I turned and went out of the
room and down the stair and out into the street. In the dust beneath
the window lay my dagger. I picked it up, sheathed it, and went my way.

The street was very quiet. All windows and doors were closed and barred;
not a soul was there to trouble me with look or speech. The yelling from
the forest had ceased; only the keen wind blew, and brought from the
Esperance upon the river a sound of singing. The sea was the home of the
men upon her decks, and their hearts dwelt not in this port; they could
sing while the smoke went up from our homes and the dead lay across the
thresholds.

I went on through the sunshine and the stillness to the minister's
house. The trees in the garden were bare, the flowers dead. The door was
not ba