From here one could get a glimpse of the first and second floor piazzas and the windows opening upon them. He could not tell which was the window of Phyl's room, it was enough for him that the place held her. In the way in which he had crossed the road, in his uneasy prowling up and down before the house, and now in his attitude as he stood motionless with head raised there was something ominous, animal-like, almost wolfish. As he stood a call suddenly came from the garden. It was the call of an owl, a white owl that rose on the sound and flitted softly as a moth across the trees to the garden beyond. Silas turned away from the gate and came back down the street towards his hotel, arrived there he went straight to his room and to bed. But he did not go to sleep. His head was full of plans, the craziest and maddest plans. Pinckney he had quite dismissed from his mind, the consciousness of having committed a vile action in drawing a knife upon an unarmed man was with him, and the knowledge that the consequences might include his expulsion from Charleston society, but all that instead of sobering him made him more reckless. He would have Phyl despite the Devil himself. He would seize her and carry her off, trap her like a bird. He determined on the morrow to return early to Grangersons and think things out. CHAPTER II Whilst he was lying in bed thinking things out, the folk at Vernons were retiring to rest. Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed to say nothing. Calhoun was for publishing the affair. "The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same thing again to some one and succeed and swing." "I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel-- He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and I don't want to push the thing against him." "I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl. She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by the Devil. They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things.