For two minutes or an hour he sat there--he knew not which. His companion, with sudden renewal of consciousness of the _déshabille_ of her dressing-gown, retreated to the corner of the brass bed. She sat down, to scrutinize the better this strange intruder. The moonlight which fell in pale green bars across the Bokhara beneath her slippered feet; the melodramatic situation which had brought them together; the unmistakable gentility of this compelling intruder of her maidenly domain; the curious collapse of his aggressiveness--all these things united to cast a sympathetic spell over her. She was foolish--to the extreme of placing herself in a ridiculous situation! She was culpable--in protecting a self-confessed butcher! She was weak--in yielding to girlish sentiment by permitting this man to shatter the conventionalities,--she who had been accustomed, throughout her twenty years of adulation and awe-inspiring respect, to a servile respect from every man, woman, and child! And, worst of all to an essentially feminine mind, she had allowed this presumptuous, calculating stranger to override her better judgment, to subjugate her resistance, without a visible tribute to the charms which had stirred the masculine souls of a continent! And yet, in spite of--perhaps, _because of_--all these illogical, provoking, equilibrium-shattering irritants--she sat there, patiently, eagerly awaiting an explanation. Consistency, thy name is not Maidenhood! Suddenly he looked at her. "Do you know what a feud is?" was the curious prologue. Her answer was apt and surprising. "Feud? Spain is the garden of feuds." "So is Kentucky. That's where I'm from. You're Spanish, then?" "Yes!" "Then you'll understand and sympathize.... Those shots you heard ended a feud which has lived through three or four generations. They brought me back to earth, to life, to a realization of things about me, after the most horrible nightmare through which I've ever passed. I know my own name now,--and I had almost forgotten it since I went back home--so short a time, so many centuries ago!" Then Warren Jarvis told her the story; his eyes were half closed, and with his fingers clasped and intertwined beneath his square-chiseled chin he recounted the steps of the recent event with the monotone of one who chants a mechanically memorized tale. She understood at last. "But what did he do when you went to his room in the hotel?" "Just what I expected--in fact, what I prayed for! As the door opened he fired his revolver--and I carry the witness inside this crimson handkerchief. I had my own weapon in my coat pocket ... it's a trick I learned in Central American revolutions. I fired from my waist, burned a hole in my overcoat--and burned a hole in the heart of that murderous hound." Suddenly he sprang to his feet and walked to the window, just as he had done back in Meadow Green so short a time before.