Keefe stepped to the table desk, where the paper lay, but as he laid his left hand upon it, with his right he quickly pulled open a drawer, grasped the pistol that was in it, and saying, with a slight smile: “A life for a life!” drew the trigger and fell to the floor. From the gruesome situation, its silence made worse by the noise of the storm outside, Daniel Wheeler led his wife and daughter. Jeffrey Allen followed quickly and sought his loved Maida. Reaction from the strain made her break down, and sobbing in his arms she asked and received full forgiveness for her enforced desertion of him. “I couldn’t do anything else, Jeff,” she sobbed. “I had to say yes to him for dad’s sake—and mother’s.” “Of course you did, darling; don’t think about it. Oh, Maida, look! The wind has torn up the sycamore! Unrooted it, and it has fallen over——” “Over into Massachusetts!” Maida cried; “Jeffrey, think what that means!” “Why—why!——” Allen was speechless. “Yes; the sycamore has gone into Massachusetts—and father can go!” “Is that real, Maida—is it truly a permission?” “Of course it is! We’ve got Governor Appleby’s letter, saying so—written when he was governor, you know! Jeffrey—I’m so happy! It makes me forget that awful——” “Do forget it all you can, dearest,” and beneath her lover’s caresses, Maida did forget, for the moment at least. “It’s the only inexplicable thing about it all, Fibs,” Fleming Stone observed, after the case was among the annals of the past, “that the old sycamore fell over and fell the right way.” “Mighty curious, F. Stone,” rejoined the boy, with an expressionless face. “You didn’t help it along, did you? You know the injunction was, ‘without intervention of human hands.’” “I didn’t intervent my hands, Mr. Stone,” said the boy, earnestly, “honest I didn’t. But—it wasn’t nominated in the bond that I shouldn’t kick around those old decaying roots with my foot—just so’s if it _should_ take a notion to fall it would fall heading north!” Transcriber’s Notes --Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication. --Provided an original cover image, for free and unrestricted use with this Distributed Proofreaders-Canada eBook. --Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged. End of Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of the Sycamore, by Carolyn Wells