"But this is madness, girl." I was trying by rough speech to break the deadly repose of her manner. "You have accused him of murder. Unless you explain these things to me I shall lay the matter before the authorities." This roused her, but in a way that I did not like. She lifted her head proudly and said: "Do not meddle, sir, in what does not concern you. This is my affair, Mr. Moran, not yours." "It concerns every person in the country--in the world," I answered, with equal coldness. "If you had no love for your sister I, at least, am concerned for you." "Listen," she interrupted, leaning toward me. "I loved her, yes, God knows! But more than that--beyond all, beyond expression, I love _him_. You have overheard a secret, but you shall not make use of it to harm him. I shall deny all. Your word against mine--it will be that. Do you think your 'authorities' will believe you?" She was now smiling like an angel and, God help me! I was heels over head in love with her! Did she, by some of the many methods of divination known to her sex, read my feelings? Her whole manner had altered. "Come," she said, almost coaxingly, "promise that you will not be impolite again." She took my arm in the most friendly way. "Come, I will walk with you. He will not know--he will remain away all night." Up and down the veranda we paced in the moonlight, she seemingly forgetting her recent bereavement, cooing and murmuring girl-wise of every kind of nothing in all Brownville; I silent, consciously awkward and with something of the feeling of being concerned in an intrigue. It was a revelation--this most charming and apparently blameless creature coolly and confessedly deceiving the man for whom a moment before she had acknowledged and shown the supreme love which finds even death an acceptable endearment. "Truly," I thought in my inexperience, "here is something new under the moon." And the moon must have smiled. Before we parted I had exacted a promise that she would walk with me the next afternoon--before going away forever--to the Old Mill, one of Brownville's revered antiquities, erected in 1860. "If he is not about," she added gravely, as I let go the hand she had given me at parting, and of which, may the good saints forgive me, I strove vainly to repossess myself when she had said it--so charming, as the wise Frenchman has pointed out, do we find woman's infidelity when we are its objects, not its victims. In apportioning his benefactions that night the Angel of Sleep overlooked me.