g
dared to speak.

And then there came a cry--and 'twas the voice of her he loved--and he
stood spellbound. 'Twas a cry of anguish--of fear--of horror and
dismay. 'Twas her voice as he had heard it ring out in the blackness of
her dream--her dear voice harsh with woe and broken into moaning--her
dear voice which he had heard murmuring love to him--crooning over her
children--laughing like music! And the torrent of words which she
poured forth made his blood cold, and yet as they fell upon his ear he
knew--yes, now he _knew_--revealed no new story to him, even though it
had been until that hour untold. No, 'twas not new, for through many an
hour when he had marked the shadow in her eyes he had vaguely guessed
some fatal burden lay upon her soul--and had striven to understand.

"And then I struck him with my whip," he heard, "knowing nothing, not
seeing, only striking like a goaded, dying thing. And he fell--he
fell--and all was done."

None heard or saw my lord Duke when, later, he passed out from the
empty room. He went forth into the fair day again, and through the Park
and into Camylott Wood. The deep amber light was there, and the
gold-green stillness, and he passed onward till he reached the great
wood's depths, and stood beneath an oak-tree's broad-spread branches,
leaning his back against the huge rough trunk, his arms folded.

This was her secret burden--this. And Nature had so moulded him that he
could look upon it with just, unflinching eyes, his soul filled with a
god-like, awful pity.

In a walled-in cellar in the deserted Dunstanwolde House lay, waiting
for the call of Judgment Day, a handful of evil dust which once had
been a man--one whose each day of life from his youth upward had
seemed, as it had passed, to leave black dregs in some poor
fellow-creature's cup. One frantic, unthinking blow struck in terror
and madness had ended him and all his evil doing, but left her standing
frenzied at the awfulness of the thing which had fallen upon her soul
in her first hour of Heaven. And all her being had risen in revolt at
this most monstrous woe of chance, and in her torture she had cried
out that in that hour she would not be struck down.

"Of ending his base life I had never thought," he had heard her wail,
"though I had thought to end my own. But when Fate struck the blow for
me, I swore that carrion should not taint my whole life through."

To atone for this she had lived her life of passionate pen