Mona raised herself. She loosed her hands from his grasp. Her woman's pride had been stung. It seemed to her that her brother was taking more than a brother's part. "There is no mistake," she said, with some anger; "Dan has been here." "You confess it?" She looked him straight in the eyes and answered, "Yes, if you call it so--I confess it. It is of no use to deceive you." Then there was an ominous silence. Ewan's features became death-like in their rigidity. A sickening sense came over him. He was struggling to ask a question that his tongue would not utter. "Mona--do you mean--do you mean that Dan has--has--outrage--Great God! what am I to say? How am I to say it?" Mona drew herself up. "I mean that I can hide my feelings no longer," she said. "Do with me as you may; I am not a child, and no brother shall govern me. Dan has been here--outrage or none--call it what you will--yes, and--" she dropped her head over the cot, "I love him." Ewan was not himself: his heart was poisoned, or then and there he would have unraveled the devilish tangle of circumstance. He tried again with another and yet another question. But every question he asked, and every answer Mona gave, made the tangle thicker. His strained jaw seemed to start from his skin. "I passed him on the road," he said to himself, in a hushed whisper. "Oh, that I had but known!" Then with a look of reproach at Mona he turned aside and went out of the room. He stepped back to the study, and there the Deemster was still tramping to and fro. "Simpleton, simpleton, to expect a woman to acknowledge her own dishonor," the Deemster cried. Ewan did not answer at once; but in silence he reached up to where the pistol hung over the mantel-shelf and took it down. "What are you doing?" cried the Deemster. "She _has_ acknowledged it," said Ewan, still in a suppressed whisper. For a moment the Deemster was made speechless and powerless by that answer. Then he laid hold of his son's hand and wrenched the pistol away. "No violence," he cried. He was now terrified at the wrath that his own evil passions had aroused; he locked the pistol in a cabinet. "It is better so," said Ewan, and in another moment he was going out at the porch. The Deemster followed him, and laid a hand on his arm. "Remember--no violence," he said; "for the love of God, see there is no violence." But Ewan, without a word more, without relaxing a muscle of his hard, white face, without a glance or a sign, but with bloodshot eyes and quivering nostrils, with teeth compressed and the great veins on his forehead large and dark over the scar that Dan had left there, drew himself away, and went out of the house. CHAPTER XIX HOW EWAN FOUND DAN Ewan went along like a man whose reason is clogged. All his faculties were deadened. He could not see properly. He could not hear. He could not think. Try as he might to keep his faculties from wandering, his mind would not be kept steady.