The girl and boy are friends; something else may ripen of their friendship. If he is my son and if, as may be, she loves him, or comes to love him, will that be a final triumphant twist in my favour against Keturah? Will that be the last word--my word--in this problem of revenge? You see, you see how deeply it has poisoned me. Perhaps I will anticipate the end. The signature of “Jacob King” completed this narrative, obviously too incredible in its statements and too monomaniacal in its tone to have any bearing on the death of Captain Buel Vanton from a pistol wound, self-inflicted. VI “I can’t,” said the smooth-shaven young man--young but evidently not so very young, either. His pale face had dark circles under the strange-lighted eyes. His black, straight hair was not brushed. The wind which ruffled it brought no colour to his cheeks. His nostrils--he had rather a snub nose--twitched. At his sides his hands kept closing and unclosing, and he stood stiffly, like a scarecrow absurdly taken from a field and firmly rooted in this spot on the sand of the Great South Beach. The young woman who faced him, with her glowing hair and her eyes and skin which seemed to reflect every atom of the downpouring sunlight, made no gesture, but met his denial with an affirmation. Two words pronounced in a low, vibrating voice: “You can.” They were ordinary young people of the twentieth century in appearance, the one perhaps more striking in beauty, the other certainly more distraught, than the average of their ages. But, except for the absence of any archaism from their speech, they might have been speakers in a drama as dark as “Hamlet.” “You are thirty,” began the girl; “I am twenty-four. You have a fortune--well, $200,000 anyway. Enough for our needs. You have another inheritance, and I do not mean a blood inheritance. You are not likely to be the son of Jacob King.” “But the son of Jacob King’s----” “Don’t say it,” she interrupted, quietly. “She has not mattered these thirty years, why should she now? No, the inheritance I mean is not of blood, but of dread, shame, and repulsion. Isn’t it enough, Guy, that in his crazed lifetime he did everything that a man could do to make you as bad as himself? Are you going to let him rule you now that he is dead? Are you going to accept that inheritance? For you need not. While he lived he dominated your life, he made you share his thoughts, he made you an innocent accomplice in evil; you were an accessory after the fact of his wrong-doing. But now he has liberated you. When he shot himself dead it was an act of emancipation. He struck the shackles from you and set you free at the same instant that he went forward to meet his sentence and punishment.” “I--I can’t,” repeated the man, hopelessly. “You forget the living tie, the woman there in the house, the one who is known as Mrs. Vanton.” The words seemed to hurt his throat.