Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-39.djvu/69

Rh that pierced through my resentment and sternness, and made me feel, as I had not done before, that the horror was not only a horror, but that it was irrevocable forever. I could not speak: I turned and walked down the room. Life is all possibility; there are few riddles that time cannot answer, few wrongs that years will not remedy; but death has no cure; everything must stop there and begin afresh. The life that is gone out is no longer an element in the problem; the Gordian knot is cut, and the severed strands are intractable and meaningless. Then we see, what was invisible till then, how much might have been saved by the strong magic of patience. But it is done; it is no dream or imagination; it is done!

I turned again: she had stepped nearer to the body, and, stooping forward, took something from the breast of her riding-habit and laid it on the dead man's heart. As I came towards her, I saw that it was a gold ring set with an opal.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"It is his," she replied. "Let it be buried with him. I have no more to do with it."

"How came you by it?"

"Call it a bequest: I always meant to return it to him," was her answer. "It meant a great deal once; but, now that he is gone, it means nothing. It is his."

"I have no curiosity to gratify, Sinfire," I said, after a pause. "I have always accepted you and everything concerning you on your own representation, and cared for nothing more. If you were compelled to answer any questions I put to you, I would ask none. Nothing that is past is any concern of mine,—or of ours; and this is no time to think of the future. Let that, too, take care of itself. But I may ask you why and how you came here. It seems strange to me, and might seem stranger still to others, if they knew."

"Oh, there's no mystery about it, Cousin Frank," replied she, looking at me with a half-smile, and speaking in a much lighter tone than she had used before. "You know I asked to be allowed to stay; and though, to please your mother, I agreed to go to the lake, I made up my mind from the first that I would come back. So, when they were all asleep, I saddled my horse, and came. I was ready to do my part," she concluded, touching the derringer at her side.

"You rode ten miles through the woods alone?"

"I feel at home in the woods. I can find my way anywhere."

"How long have you been here?"

"I don't know; not long. I left my horse a mile from here, in the old barn, and walked the rest of the way. A little while ago some one