As she thought of it anew, sitting before the fire, she laid the work upon her knee and unconsciously wrung her hands. The next moment she felt the eyes of the officer lifted toward her in a cursory glance. She affected to shift the rings on her fingers, then took up the crochet-needle and bent her head to the deft fashioning of shells. Now she could think unmolested, think of what she could never forget! Yet why should she canvass the details again and again, save that she must. The event marked an epoch of final significance in her life,--the moment that her dream fled and she awakened to the stern fact that she had ceased to love. And at first it was a trifle, a mere trifle, that had inaugurated this amazing change. Her husband wished to sell the horse, her horse, that Judge Roscoe had given her a week before. The gift had come, she knew, as an overture of reconciliation, as there had been much hard feeling between Judge Roscoe and his niece. For after her elopement and marriage he promptly applied to the chancery court seeking to protect her future by securing the settlement on her of certain funds of her estate, urging the fact of her minority and the spendthrift character of her husband. Leonora vehemently opposed the petition, and owing to the efforts of her counsel to gain time and the law's delays, she came of age before any decree could be granted, and then defeated the measure by making a full legal waiver of her rights in favor of her husband. But, at length, when pity overmastered Judge Roscoe's just anger, she welcomed a token of his renewed cordiality. She did not feel at liberty to sell the gift, she had remonstrated. It was not bestowed as a resource--to sell. She feared to wound her kinsman. What was the pressing necessity for money? Why not manage as if the horse had not been given her? The contention waxed high as she stood in habit and hat just in the vestibule with the horse outside hitched to the block, for Judge Roscoe was coming to ride with her. She held fast, for a wonder; she seldom could resist; but the horse was not theirs _to sell_. Rufus Gwynn suddenly turned at last, sprang up the stairs, three steps at a time, and as he came bounding down again she saw the glint of steel in his hand. Even now she shuddered. "It is growing colder," Captain Baynell said. (How observant that man seemed to be!) "Allow me to mend the fire." He stirred the hickory logs, and as the yellow flames shot up the chimney he sank back into his great chair, and she took up the thread of her work and her reminiscences together. She honestly thought her husband had intended to kill her. Somehow the veil dropped from her eyes, and she knew him for the fiend he was even before the dastardly act that revealed him unqualified.