with no hope to win. His fingers crooked,
his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid in the ghostly light.

"Dillworth," cried my father, in a great voice, like one who would
startle a creature out of mania, "you will write a deed in your
legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child. And after
that"--his words were like the blows of a hammer on an anvil--"I will
give you until daybreak to vanish out of our sight and hearing--through
the gap in the mountains into Maryland on your horse, as you say your
brother David went, or into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard
where he lies under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his
murdered body!"

The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were burned
down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with the scrawls
and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood at a window looking
out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed and helpless, in the
protection of his arm.

And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon, the
hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a monkey,
his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body rolling in the
saddle--while the black, distorted shadow that had followed my father
into this tragic house went on before him like some infernal messenger
convoying the rider to the Pit.

IX. The End of the Road

The man laughed.

It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly
disturbed the composition of his features.

"I fear, Lady Muriel," he said, "that your profession is ruined. Our
friend--'over the water'--is no longer concerned about the affairs of
England."

The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the wrists.
Her face was anxious and drawn.

"I am rather desperately in need of money," she said.

The cynicism deepened in the man's face.

"Unfortunately," he replied, "a supply of money cannot be influenced by
the intensity of one's necessity for it."

He was a man indefinite in age. His oily black hair was brushed
carefully back. His clothes were excellent, with a precise detail.
Everything about him was conspicuously correct in the English fashion.
But the man was not English. One could not say from what race he
came. Among the races of Southern Europe he could hardly have been
distinguished. There was a chameleon quality strongly dominant in the
creature.

The woman looked up quickly, as in a strong avers