Then he mounted his horse and rode swiftly to Millwood. He was astonished to find a fire in the hearth, a lamp burning, and one of Helen's gloves lying on the table. By it was another pair. He picked them up and looked closely. Within, in red ink, were the initials: _R. T._ He bit his lips till the blood came. He bowed his head in his hands. Sometimes there comes to us that peculiar mental condition in which we are vaguely conscious that once before we have been in the same place, amid the same conditions and surroundings which now confront us. We seem to be living again a brief moment of our past life, where Time himself has turned back everything. It came that instant to Edward Conway. "It was here--and what was it? Oh, yes:--'Some men repent to God's smile, some to His frown, and some to His fist?'"--He groaned:--"This is His fist. Never--never before in all the history of the Conway family has one of its women--" He sat down on the old sofa and buried, again, his face in his hands. Edward Conway was sober, but he still had the instincts of the drunkard--it never occurred to him that he had done anything to cause it. Drunkenness was nothing--a weakness--a fault which was now behind him. But this--this--the first of all the Conway women--and his daughter--his child--the _beautiful one_. He sat still, and then he grew very calm. It was the calmness of the old Conway spirit returning. "Richard Travis," he said to himself, "knows as well what this act of his means in the South,--in the unwritten law of our land--as I do. He has taken his chance of life or death. I'll see that it is death. This is the last of me and my house. But in the fall I'll see that this Philistine of Philistines dies under its ruins." He arose and started out. He saw the lap robe in the hall, and this put him to investigating. The mares and buggy he found under the shed. It was all a mystery to him, but of one thing he was sure: "He will soon come back for them. I can wait." Choosing a spot in the shadow of a great tree, he sat down with his pistol across his knees. The moon had arisen and cast ghostly shadows over everything. It was a time for repentance, for thoughts of the past with him, and as he sat there, that terrible hour, with murder in his heart, bitterness and repentance were his. He was a changed man. Never again could he be the old self. "But the blow--the blow," he kept saying, "I thought it would fall on me--not on her--my beautiful one--not on a Conway woman's chastity--not my wife's daughter--" He heard steps coming down the path. His heart ceased a moment, it seemed to him, and then beat wildly. He drew a long breath to relieve it--to calm it with cool oxygen, and then he cocked the five chambered pistol and waited as full of the joy of killing as if the man who was now walking down the path was a wolf or a mad dog--down the path and right into the muzzle of the pistol, backed by the arm which could kill.