drinking the nectar while he was condemned to the
dregs. He felt that that way lay madness. That way was more than could
be endured. He could endure all else, whatever life had in store for
him, but the thought that he must stand by while Kate be given to
another was more than his fate, for all its perversity, could expect
of him.

From his veranda that morning, as on the morning before, Charlie had
seen Kate and Stanley Fyles walking together. More than that he had
heard from Kate herself of her admiration of the police officer. And,
in these things, so trifling perhaps, so commonplace, he had read the
forecast of a mind naturally dreading, and eaten up by suspicion. He
would have been ready to suspect his own brother, had not a merciful
providence made it plain to him that Bill possessed interest solely in
the laughing gray eyes of Kate's sister.

Now, as he rode along, he saw dull visions of a future in which Kate
no longer played a part. A demon of jealousy was driving him. He
longed impotently for the power to rob the man of the possibility of
winning that which was dearest to him. In the momentary madness which
his jealousy invoked he felt that the death of this man, his life
crushed out between his own lean hands, would be something approaching
a joy worth living for.

But such murderous thoughts were merely passing. They fled again
before the pessimism so long his habit. It would not help him one
iota. It would rob Kate of a happiness which he felt was her due,
which he desired for her; it would rob him of the last vestige of even
her pitying regard.

Then he laughed to himself, a laugh full of a hatefulness that somehow
did not seem to fit him. It was inspired by the thought of how easy it
would be to shoot the heart out of the man he deemed his rival. Others
had done such things, he told himself. Then, with a world of
bitterness, he added, far better men than himself.

But he knew that no such intention was really his. He knew that
beneath all his bitterness of feeling, and before all things, he
desired Kate's happiness and security. A strange magnanimity, in a
nature so morally weak, so lacking in all that the world regards as
the signs of true manhood, was his. Even his life, he felt, would be
small enough price to pay for the happiness and security of the only
woman who had ever held out the strong arm of support and affection
for him to lean upon, the only woman he had ever truly loved.

So a nigh