he saw it, even in himself. His books had taught him that the mind
could hold but one thought at a time, and, persistently, he had
displaced the unpleasant ones which constantly strove for the right of
possession.

Hard work and new love and daily wearying of the body to the point of
exhaustion had banished those phantoms of earlier years, save in his
dreams. At night, the soul claims its own--its right to suffer for its
secret sins, its shirking, its betrayals.

It is not pleasant for a man to be branded, in his own consciousness, a
coward. Refusal to admit it by day does not change the hour of the
night when life is at its lowest ebb, and, sleepless, man faces himself
as he is.

The necklace slipped snakily over his hand--one of those white, firm
hands which could guide the knife so well--and Anthony Dexter
shuddered. He flung the box far from him into the shrubbery, went back
into the house, and slammed the door.

He sat down at the table, but could not eat. The Past had come from
its grave, veiled, like the ghost in the garden that he had seen
yesterday.

It was not an hallucination, then. Only one person in the world could
have laid those discoloured pearls at his door in the dead of night.
The black figure in the garden, with the chiffon fluttering about its
head, was Evelina Grey--or what was left of her.

"Why?" he questioned uneasily of himself. "Why?" He had repeatedly