He looked into her eyes as if trying to read the lowest lines of their meaning, but he found nothing to aid him. The love-light had faded and in its stead the cold beam of loveless duty shone out clear and strong. He saw that she was as hopelessly gone from him as if she lay dead in her grave. He stretched out his arms toward her, but quickly withdrew them, not, however, on account of a swift, facile movement of Ransom's hand to the place where a pistol is usually concealed by a man who carries one, for he did not see it, but because her eyes repelled him. There was nothing for him to do but to go away forever. He rushed from the room and from the house. Half way to the gate he stopped and turned about, fixing upon the weather-stained old building a gaze that it would have been awful to contemplate, so intense, so wild, so malignant. His hands were clenched, his lips, so compressed that they seemed welded, were cold and purple. For a mere point of time he was a murderer; but, despite the intervening wall of the house, he could see Agnes clinging to her husband and the mood was flung aside. Her husband! What right had he to survive that well-aimed shot? What right had he to escape from a Mexican prison and drag his wrecked body and withered soul back here to crush out such a love as that which but an hour ago had lighted up the whole world? It was but a flash of desperate passion, that came and went in an instant, leaving Reynolds all the more helplessly bewildered. What could he do? He stood there rigid, breathless, choking in the impotence of utter irresolution. Again he turned towards the carriage. Far and near in the tender foliage of the trees the mocking birds sang with lusty fervor. The sweet South breathed upon him the warm, odorous breath of love's own clime. Dan the driver, from his seat on the carriage, had watched this melodramatic scene from first to last, so far at least as it was not shut out from his vision, with all the open-mouthed wonder characteristic of a negro under such circumstances. He well knew that the predicament was one of no ordinary sort, and that weighty interests were involved. He had expected every moment to see knives or pistols gleam and flash, but he had been so dazed and scared that he could not have moved to save his life. He sat there gripping the lines and leaning forward in an attitude of painful rigidity, his shoulders elevated and his chin thrust out, lost to every thing but the excitement that had taken possession of him. Uncle Mono, in blissful ignorance of the drama, was down in the little plat of ground devoted to his melon vines, stirring the sandy loam with a hoe and singing a lively camp-meeting song. The two silver dollars given to him by Reynolds had made him very happy indeed.