"Are you mad, Harry?" "Perfectly sane, I hope." "It cannot be your attention to marry _her_? How can you think of so degrading yourself?" "You are mistaking the case altogether, Emily. I, and my family with me, will be honoured by the alliance." "What on earth do you mean?" A half smile crossed his face at her wondering look, but he gave no explanation: perhaps the time had not come. I escaped from the room, and he came after me. "Anne, I want you to go with me to the west wing. George says he should like to see you." I went up with him at once. George Heneage—I shall never call him Chandos, and indeed he had never assumed the name—sat in the same easy-chair with the pillows at his back. Mr. Chandos put me a seat near, and he took my hands within his wasted ones. They called him better. Better! He, with the white, drawn face, the glassy eyes, the laboured breath! "My little friend Anne! Have you quite forgotten me?" "No; I have remembered you always, Mr. Heneage. I am sorry to see you look so ill." "Better that I should look so. My life is a burden to me and to others. I have prayed to God a long while to take it, and I think He has at last heard me. Leave us, Harry, for a few minutes." I felt half frightened as Mr. Chandos went out. What could he want with me?—and he looked so near death! "You have retained a remembrance of those evil days?" he abruptly began, turning on the pillow to face me. "Every remembrance, I think. I have forgotten nothing." "Just so: they could but strike forcibly on a child's heart. Well, ever since Harry told me that it was _you_ who were in this house, a day or two back now, I have thought I must see you at the last. I should not like to die leaving you to a wrong impression. You have assumed, with the rest of the world, that I murdered Philip King?" I hesitated, really not knowing what to say. "But I did not murder him. The shot from my gun killed him, but not intentionally. As Heaven, soon to be my judge, hears me, I tell you the truth. Philip King had angered me very much. As I saw him in the distance smoking a cigar, his back against the tree's trunk, I pointed my gun at him and put my finger on the trigger, saying, 'How I should like to put a shot into you!' Without meaning it—without meaning it, the gun went off; Anne: my elbow caught against the branch of a tree, and it went off and shot him. I had rather—yes, even then—that it had shot myself." "But why did you not come forward and say so, Mr. Heneage?"