“Now you must tell me the worst thing he ever did. I will know it!” “They say he threw a man over a precipice once, and nearly broke his back. The fellow had been stealing water, when there wasn’t enough to go around, and he had had his share. He lied about it, too. Old Oscar just chucked him off the trail like a rat. He would call that justice. I don’t know. That was before I knew him.” She shivered, and held her husband’s hand more tightly. “Go on!” “There were other stories of the same thing; well, we’d call it murder now, maybe!” And she forced him to tell much--the dark deeds of this old Berserker in his mad rages,--swift, brutal love, murder--all that the furies of blood drive a man to do. Bit by bit, she had them all,--stories whispered here and there on the slopes of mountains, in far-off mining camps and towns, where the Norseman had spent his life; things remembered out of that rough childhood for which she had pitied her husband, for which she had loved him the more, with a woman’s desire to make the bitter sweet. As the soft summer night got on, she heard the story of that killing, the sole one which he had seen with his own eyes. He had locked it tight within his breast all the years since: the quarrel with a friend about some insignificant trifle, the burst of anger, the sudden blow, and then, while the boy tried to part the men, a strange look of wonder on the fierce face from which the red passion was paling. And the next morning forgetfulness of it all! “But it troubled him always like a bad dream--he could never remember exactly what he had done. He never thought _I_ knew.” She rose from the bench and walked away from him to the end of the terrace. “And, my Evelyn,” he pleaded, “you loved me first because _he_ had been all I had had. You asked nothing of me--you gave me all your love gladly.” He had an uneasy feeling that something strange and impalpable was pushing its way between them. “Yes,” she murmured. “It was--a long time ago.” “Seven years. Is that a long time?” “Yes. I was a girl then. It is always a long time to when one was a girl.” “It doesn’t seem to me a long time!” “Well, it’s a great while since, since _this_ came up--like a mountain. The past is on the other side.” “I don’t know what you mean. No kind of trouble should divide man and wife!” For a few moments there was silence; then she cried, in the accent of reproach, of accusation: “Can’t you see? You were _his_ child!” “Old Oscar’s?... Sometimes I have thought it might be so. I am dark like him. But we can never know it now.” “_I_ know it! The devil in that bad old man has slept in you and is waking in little Oscar,--my child, _my_ child! That is what you have brought me for my love. I took you because I loved you, because I was mad to have you. I wanted you just for myself, just to give me joy. Now! Now!... I can sit and watch the child who is me fight with that devil. Oh! there is nothing but pain!” [Illustration] IV