supported me with an arm about my waist.
'Miss Dement, are you ill?' he said.
It was not an exclamation; there was neither alarm nor solicitude in it. If he had added: 'I suppose that is about what I am expected to say,' he would hardly have expressed his sense of the situation more clearly. His manner filled me with shame and indignation, for I was suffering acutely. I wrenched my hand out of his, grasped the arm supporting me and pushing myself free, fell plump into the sand and sat helpless. My hat had fallen off in the struggle and my hair tumbled about my face and shoulders in the most mortifying way.
'Go away from me,' I cried, half choking. 'O
I actually said those identical words! And then I broke down and sobbed. Irene, I
His manner altered in an instant—I could see that much through my fingers and hair. He dropped on one knee beside me, parted the tangle of hair and said in the tenderest way: 'My poor girl, God knows I have not intended to pain you. How should I?—I who love you—I who have loved you for—for years and years!'
He had pulled my wet hands away from my face and was covering them with kisses. My cheeks were like two coals, my whole face was flaming and, I think, steaming. What could I do? I hid it on his shoulder—there was no other place. And, O my dear friend, how my leg tingled and thrilled, and how I wanted to kick!
We sat so for a long time. He had released one of my hands to pass his arm about me again and I possessed myself of my handkerchief and was drying my eyes and my nose. I would not look up until that was done; he tried in vain to push me a little away and gaze into my face. Presently, when all was right, and it had grown a bit dark, I lifted my head, looked him straight in the eyes and smiled my best—my level best, dear.
'What do you mean,' I said, 'by 'years and years'?'
'Dearest,' he replied, very gravely, very earnestly, 'in the absence of the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes, the lank hair, the slouching gait, the rags, dirt, and youth, can you not—will you not understand? Gunny, I'm Dumps!'
In a moment I was upon my feet and he upon his. I seized him by the lapels of his coat and peered into his handsome face in the deepening darkness. I was breathless with excitement.
'And you are not dead?' I asked, hardly knowing what I said.
'Only dead in love, dear. I recovered from the road agent's bullet, but this, I fear, is fatal.'
'But about Jack—Mr. Raynor? Don't you know—'
'I am ashamed to say, darling, that it was through that unworthy person's suggestion that I came here from Vienna.'
Irene, they have roped in your affectionate friend,
MARY JANE DEMENT.
P.S.—The worst of it is that there is no mystery; that was the invention of Jack Raynor, to arouse my curiosity. James is not a Thug. He solemnly assures me that in all his wanderings he has never set foot in Sepoy.
THE EYES OF THE PANTHER
I
ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS MARRY WHEN INSANE
A man and a woman—nature had done the grouping—sat on a rustic seat, in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate—a man at whom one would look again. The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with something in her figure and movements suggesting the word 'lithe.' She was habited in a gray gown with odd brown markings in the texture. She may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied attention to all else. They were gray-green, long and narrow, with an expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.
The man and the woman talked.
'Yes,' said the woman, 'I love you, God knows! But marry you, no. I cannot, will not.'
'Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a reason. I've a right to know, to understand, to feel and prove my fortitude if I have it. Give me a reason.'
'For loving you?'
The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor. That did not stir any sense of humor in the man.
'No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I've a right to know. I must know. I will know!'
He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his face a frown—it might have been called a scowl. He looked as if he might attempt to learn by strangling her. She smiled no more—merely sat looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly without emotion or sentiment. Yet it had something in it that tamed his resentment and made him shiver.
'You are determined to have my reason?' she asked in a tone that was entirely mechanical—a tone that might have been her look made audible.
'If you please—if I'm not asking too much.'
Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion over his co-creature.
'Very well, you shall know: I am insane.'
The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought to be amused. But, again, the sense of humor failed him in his need and despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did not believe. Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good understanding.
'That is what the physicians would say,' the woman continued—'if they knew. I might myself prefer to call it a case of 'possession.' Sit down and hear what I have to say.'
The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the wayside. Over-against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that peculiar quality that foretells the twilight. Something of its mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man's mood. In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages of night. Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story told by Irene Marlowe. In deference to the reader's possible prejudice against the artless method of an unpractised historian the author ventures to substitute his own version for hers.
II
A ROOM MAY BE TOO NARROW FOR THREE, THOUGH ONE IS OUTSIDE
In a little log house containing a single room sparely and rudely furnished, crouching on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman, clasping to her breast a child. Outside, a dense unbroken forest extended for many miles in every direction. This was at night and the room was black dark: no human eye could have discerned the woman and the child. Yet they were observed, narrowly, vigilantly, with never even a momentary slackening of attention; and that is the pivotal fact upon which this narrative turns.
Charles Marlowe was of the class, now extinct in this country, of woodmen pioneers—men who found their most acceptable surroundings in sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward,
