"It could have come but in one way; I am to be made a victim if----" He turned upon me with a wild look in which there was something personal. "Are you worth the penalty which my good name must suffer?" he violently cried. "For I swear that to you and you only I owe the position in which I now stand!" "God help me then!" I murmured, dazed and confounded by this unexpected reproach. "Had you been less beautiful, less alluring in your dignity and grace, my brother----" He paused and bit his lip. "Enough!" he cried. "I had wellnigh forgotten that generosity and forbearance are to actuate my movements in the future. I beg your pardon--and his!" he added, with deep and bitter sarcasm, under his breath. This allusion to Guy, unpleasant and shocking as it was, gave me a peculiar sensation that was not unlike that of relief, while at the same moment the glimpse of something, which I was fain to call a revelation, visited my mind and led me impetuously to say: "I hope you are not thinking of sacrificing yourself for another less noble and less generous than yourself. If such is the clew to actions which certainly have looked dubious till now, I pray that you will reconsider your duty and not play the Don Quixote too far." But Dwight Pollard, instead of accepting this explanation of his conduct with the eagerness of a great relief, only shook his head and declared: "My brother--for I know who you mean, Miss Sterling--is no more amenable to the law than myself. Neither of us were guilty of the action that terminated Mr. Barrows' life." "And yet," came in the strange and unexpected tones of a third person, "can you say, in the presence of her you profess to respect and of me whom you once professed to love, that either you or your brother are guiltless of his death?" and turning simultaneously toward the doorway, we saw gleaming in its heavy frame the vivid form and glittering eyes of his most redoubtable enemy and mine--Rhoda Colwell. He fell back before this apparition and appeared to lose his power of speech. She advanced like an avenging Nemesis between us. "Speak!" she vehemently exclaimed. "Are you--I say nothing of your brother, who is nothing to me or to her--are _you_ guiltless, in the sense in which she would regard guilt, of David Barrows' death?" And her fierce eyes, shining through her half-closed lashes like lurid fires partly veiled, burned upon his face, which, turning paler and paler, drooped before her gaze till his chin settled upon his breast and we could barely hear the words that fell from his lips: "God knows I would not dare to say I am." XIII. GUY POLLARD. I will tell you why. --HAMLET.