Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains--her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair. The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold. His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem. What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?" he muttered. "It is justifiable--it is neither gross nor cowardly--to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly--of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand--toward the silver-mounted revolver.