Up at the "ranking" end of the row Oswald Dwight lay in the grasp of a burning fever that, coupled with what had gone before, had weakened his reason and might well end his life. Under the same roof, visited at intervals by the charitable, the sympathetic or the merely inquisitive of their sex and station, Mrs. Dwight and her inseparable companion, Félicie, made their moan and told their woeful tale to all comers. Inez had been, she said, suffering all the torments of purgatory, and to many eyes she looked it. Her husband, in his mad delirium, would not have her near him: _he_ raved of the wife of his youth. She wept for his boy who had been taken from her, his proper, his natural, his legal protector at such a time. Inez was horrified to think of the outrage upon Captain Foster, their attached and devoted friend. Inez would never believe, she said, that such a gentleman as Mr. Ray could stoop to so vile a vengeance, to the level of the assassin, but Félicie had other views. The episode of that blood-stained gauntlet had been by no means forgotten, and was dinned into the ears of those who would listen, with infinite vim and pertinacity; this, too, despite the fact that Ray denied having worn gauntlets that evening--having worn them, in fact, that summer. They were no longer "uniform" for cavalry officers, and he had not set eyes on that glove or its mate for over a month. Possibly during the move from the major's quarters to the humble home of the subaltern, but certainly somehow, Ray had lost several items that, before the change in uniform, had been in frequent use, but of late would hardly be missed, and of these were the gauntlets.