It was the evening of the second day and we three were in the living-room together; Jason reading at the window. Zyp had been so kind to me that my heart was very full indeed, and now she sat by me, one hand slipped into mine, the other supporting her little pointed chin, while her sweet, flower-stained eyes communed with other, it seemed, than affairs of earth. A strange wistful tenderness had marked her late treatment of me; a pathetic solicitude that was inexpressibly touching to one so forlorn. Suddenly she rose and I heard Jason’s book rustle in his hand. “Now, little boy,” she said, “’tis time you were in bed.” Then she leaned toward me and whispered: “Is he so unhappy? What has he done for Zyp’s sake?” In a moment she bent and kissed me, with a soft kiss, on the forehead, and shooting a Parthian glance of defiance at Jason, who never spoke or moved, ran from the room. All my soul thrilled with a delicious joy. Zyp, who had refused to kiss him, had kissed me. The ecstasy of her lips’ touch blotted out all significance her words might carry. Half-stunned with triumphant happiness, I climbed the stairs and, getting into bed, fell into a luminous dream of thought in which for the moment was no place for apprehension. I did not even hear Jason enter or shut the door, and it was only when he shook me roughly by the shoulder that I became conscious of his presence in the room. He was standing over me, and the windows of his soul were down, and through them wickedness grinned like a skull. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said in a terrible low voice. “D’you want to drive me to telling that I know it was you who killed Modred?” CHAPTER XI. CONVICT, BUT NOT SENTENCED. So the blow had fallen! Yet a single despairing effort I made to beat off or at least postpone the inevitable. I sat up in bed and answered my brother back with, I could feel, ashen and quivering lips. “What do you mean?” I said. “How dare you say such a thing?” “I dare anything,” he said, “where I have a particular object in view.” He never took his eyes off me, and the cold devil in them froze my blood that had only now run so hotly. “For yourself,” he went on, “I don’t care much whether you hang or live. You can come to terms with your own conscience I dare say, and a fat brother more or less may be a pure question of fit survival. That’s as it may be--but the girl here is another matter.” “I didn’t kill him,” I could only say, dully. Still keeping his eyes on me he sought for and drew from his jacket pocket a twist of dry and shrunken water weed. A horrible shudder seized me as I looked upon it. “You didn’t think to see that again?” he said. “Do you recognize it? Of course you do. It was the rope you twisted round his foot, and that I found round his foot still, after dad had carried him upstairs, bundled round with those sacks, and I was left alone in the room with him a minute.”