Short and to the point was the little mountain minister’s service, and when he had done he shook hands with them, and again he stared at them as they went back up the stair, still hand in hand.  At her door they stopped.  There were no words to speak now, as her heart lay against his heart, and her lips against his lips.  And then, after those moments, she drew a little back, and there came suddenly that sweet, quivering, joyous play of her lips as she said: 

“And now, my husband, may I dress my hair?”

“My hair,” he corrected, and let her go from his arms.

Her door closed behind her.  A little dizzily he turned to his room.  His hand was on the knob when he heard her speak his name.  She had reopened her door, and stood with something in her hand, which she was holding toward him.  He went back, and she gave him a photograph.

“John, you will destroy this,” she whispered.  “It is his photograph—­Mortimer FitzHugh’s.  I brought it to show to people, that it might help me in my search.  Please—­destroy it!”

He returned to his room and placed the photograph on his table.  It was wrapped in thin paper, and suddenly there came upon him a most compelling desire to see what Mortimer FitzHugh had looked like in life.  Joanne would not care.  Perhaps it would be best for him to know.

He tore off the paper.  And as he looked at the picture the hot blood in his veins ran cold.  He stared—­stared as if some wild and maddening joke was being played upon his faculties.  A cry rose to his lips and broke in a gasping breath, and about him the floor, the world itself, seemed slipping away from under his feet.

For the picture he held in his hand was the picture of Culver Rann!

CHAPTER XXI

For a minute, perhaps longer, John Aldous stood staring at the photograph which he held in his hand.  It was the picture of Culver Rann—­not once did he question that fact, and not once did the thought flash upon him that this might be only an unusual and startling resemblance.  It was assuredly Culver Rann!  The picture dropped from his hand to the table, and he went toward the door.  His first impulse was to go to Joanne.  But when he reached the door he locked it, and dropped into a chair, facing the mirror in his dresser.

The reflection of his own face was a shock to him.  If he was pale, the dust and grime of his fight in the cavern concealed his pallor.  But the face that stared at him from out of the glass was haggard, wildly and almost grotesquely haggard, and he turned from it with a grim laugh, and set his jaws hard.  He returned to the table, and bit by bit tore the photograph into thin shreds, and then piled the shreds on his ash-tray and burned them.  He opened a window to let out the smoke and smell of charring paper, and the fresh, cool air of early evening struck his face.  He could look off through the fading sunshine