"You never knew my wife: she died before you were born. She was the most beautiful and the best-loved of women. That you will not understand. You do not know yet what a woman is to a man, and your cousin Helen, to whom the doll belonged, would have been as beautiful as her mother. A fortnight before I became an outlaw there came a new officer to command the garrison at Dimitzana. He was a pleasant-seeming man, and to me, being the mayor of the village, he paid much attention. He would sit with us all in the garden after dinner. Sometimes I asked him to take his dinner with us; sometimes he asked me to dine with him. But Catharine always disliked him; often she was barely civil to him. He had been in the place nearly a fortnight when I had to go away for a night, or perhaps two, to Andritsaena for the election of the mayor, for I had some little property there, and therefore a vote in the matter. I left about midday, but I had not gone more than four hours from the town when I met a man from Andritsaena, who told me that the election would be an affair of form only, as one of the two candidates had resigned. So I turned my horse round and went home. "It was dark before I got to the village, and I noticed that there was no light in my house. However, I supposed that Catharine was spending the evening with some friend, and I suspected nothing. But it got later and ever later and she did not come, so at last I went out and called at all the houses where she was likely to be. She was not at any of them, and no one had seen her. Then unwillingly, and with a heart grown somehow suddenly cold, I determined to go to the officer's quarters and ask if he had seen her. There was a light burning in one of the upper windows, but the door was locked. "It was when I found that the door was locked that I drew my pistol from my belt and loaded it, and then I waited a moment. In that moment I heard the sound of a woman sobbing and crying from inside the house, and the next minute I had burst the door open. The room inside was dark, but a staircase led up from it through the floor of the room above, and I made two jumps of it. Helen--she was only seven years old--ran across the room, perhaps knowing my step, crying 'Father, father!' and as my head appeared the officer fired. He missed me, and shot Helen dead. "Before he could fire again I fired at him. He fell with a rattling, broken sound across the floor, and never spoke nor moved. Catharine was there, and she came slowly across the room to me. "'Ah, you have come,' she said; 'you are too late.' "I sat down on the bed, and my throat was as dry as a sirocco wind, and laid the double-barrelled pistol, still smoking, by me. Neither of us, I am sure, gave one thought to the man who was lying there, perhaps hardly to Helen, for dishonor is worse than death; and for me I could say no word, but sat there like a thing broken. "'You are too late,' she repeated; 'and for me this is the only way.'