"Lookee here," said Deane, taking him confidentially by the arm: "I don't mind letting you into a secret if you'll keep dark." The lawyer nodded gravely. "_You_ can make a pot of money out of it," continued Deane. It was not exactly the line of suggestion anticipated, and it was Mr. Winnett's turn to ask "How?" "I've strictly private and confidential information, you know--" "Of course, of course," acquiesced the lawyer. "That the other side is devilish hard up," said Deane in an emphatic whisper. "See 'em privately on that p'int. It's no use talking to us: we're flush." With that he strode abruptly into the dark, leaving Mr. Winnett to puzzle out whether he had just heard a serious proposition or had been subjected to the hoax of a solemn wag. That ended the efforts to stop the duel, and night with its grief and penitence came on all interested in the parties to it. On the dowager in her cushioned chair, with a finger in the prayer-book, seeing the portrait of her only son brought home stricken to death by his own gun thirty years ago, as it changed from the long curls and blue eyes of childhood to a handsome but weak bearded face of a man, dreadfully like that other face as she saw it on the bed under the white seals of death. On a homely old mother lying in the back room of a village store, and a short, square man walking up and down and saying, "Don't take on so, old gal: you'll hurt yourself. It's just them newspaper lies. Our Bob wouldn't fight no dule." And the woman's sob: "Lost, body and soul! soul and body!--our boy Bob, John! our boy Bob!" On poor little Sue with her headache as she answers her mother's inquiry that she's "Better, mamma;" but as her father asks the same question she puts up her arms about his neck, and says, "Oh, papa! oh, papa!" and the shrewd, worldly man kneels down and prays with her for the life of that alien sinner yonder as he has not prayed since he was a man. On Bob himself at the hotel quietly reading to the listening major, "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live," as if every comforting word was a denunciation. CHAPTER VI.