‘It was no deliberate baseness,’ said Lucius quietly. He had in some measure recovered his composure since that burst of passionate grief. ‘I did what at the moment appeared to me only an act of justice. I took a life for a life.’ ‘You, Lucius!’ cried the other, his eyes opening wide with horror. ‘You took the life of a man—yonder—in America?’ ‘Yes, Geoffrey. I killed the man who blighted my sister’s life.’ ‘Good God! He is dead then—this scoundrel—and by your hand.’ ‘He is. And if ever man deserved to die by the act of his fellow man that man most fully merited his fate. But though in that awful hour, when the deed of horror which I had discovered was burnt into my brain, I took his life deliberately and advisedly, the memory of the act has been a torment to me ever since. But let me tell you the secret of that miserable time. It is not a long story, and I will tell it in as few words as possible.’ Briefly, but with an unflinching truthfulness, he told of the night scene in the forest; the ruffian’s attempt to enter the hut; and the bullet which struck him down as he burst open the window. ‘You lay there, Geoffrey, unconscious; sleeping that blessed sleep which Gods sends to those whose feet have trodden the border-land betwixt life and death. Even to awaken you roughly might have been to peril your chance of recovery. The firing of the gun might have done it. But my first thought was that he, the assassin and traitor who had slaughtered the faithful companion of our dangers and privation—that he, brutal and merciless as any savage in the worst island of the Pacific—should not be suffered to approach you in your helplessness. I had warned him that if he attempted to cross our threshold I would shoot him down with as little compunction as if he had been a mad dog. I kept my word.’ ‘But are you certain your bullet was fatal?’ ‘Of what followed the firing of that shot I know nothing; but I have never doubted its result. Even if the wound were not immediately fatal the man must have speedily perished. The last I saw was the loosening clutch of his lean hand as he dropped from the window; the last I heard was a howl of pain. My brain, which had been kept on the rack for many a dreary night of sleeplessness and fear, gave way all at once, and I fell to the ground like a log. I have every reason to believe that what I suffered at that moment was an apoplectic seizure, which might have been fatal, but for Schanck’s promptitude in bleeding me. After the shock came brain fever, from which, as you know, I was slow to recover. When my senses did return, I seemed to enter upon a new world. Thought and memory came back by degrees, and the vision of that scene in the forest shaped itself slowly out of the confusion of my brain until it became the vivid picture which has haunted me ever since.’ ‘Had you met the man who betrayed your sister, would you have killed him?’ asked Geoffrey. ‘In fair fight, yes.’