arm with a spatter of blood on it. It
lay extended along the grass just beside the driveway. She was obliged
to take a step or two toward it before seeing that it was Claude's arm,
and that he himself was lying on the sward of the lawn, with a little
trickle of blood from his heart.

She was not frightened. She was not even appalled. She understood as
readily what she ought to do as if the accident had been part of every
day's routine. But as her glance went first to the dead brother and then
to the living one she knew that her substitute for love had been found.

CHAPTER XXXIII

When Jasper Fay was tried for the murder of Claude Masterman, and
acquitted of the charge, it was generally felt that the ends of justice
had been served. No human being, whatever his secret opinion, could have
desired the further punishment of that little old man whose sufferings
might have expiated any possible crime in advance. The jury having found
it improbable that at his age, and with his infirmities, he should have
been lurking in the village at ten o'clock at night and waiting in the
neighborhood of Colcord jail at dawn of the next morning, the verdict
was accepted with relief not only in the little court-house of the
county town, but by the outside public. To none was this absolution more
nearly of the nature of a joy than to the unfortunate young man's
family.

* * * * *

That was in the winter of 1912, and in the mean while Lois had been led
so successfully by her substitute for love as to be at times unaware of
her lack of the divine original. For she was busy, so it seemed to her,
every day of every week and every minute of every day. The first
dreadful necessities on that night of the 9th of July having been
attended to, her thought flew at once to the father and mother of the
dead boy.

"Thor dear, I know exactly what I'm going to do about them, if you'll
let me."

It was early morning by the time she said that, and all that was
immediately pressing was over. Claude was lying in one of the spare
rooms that had been prepared for him, and Dr. Noonan, together with the
four or five grave, burly men, Irish-Americans as far as she could
judge, who had been in and about the house all night hunting for traces
of the crime, had gone away. Those who were still beating the shrubbery
and the grounds were not in view from the library windows. Maggs and his
wife were in the house, as well as De