“What do you mean,” I said, “by ’years and years’?”

“Dearest,” he replied, very gravely, very earnestly, “in the absence of the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes, the lank hair, the slouching gait, the rags, dirt, and youth, can you not—­will you not understand?  Gunny, I’m Dumps!”

In a moment I was upon my feet and he upon his.  I seized him by the lapels of his coat and peered into his handsome face in the deepening darkness.  I was breathless with excitement.

“And you are not dead?” I asked, hardly knowing what I said.

“Only dead in love, dear.  I recovered from the road agent’s bullet, but this, I fear, is fatal.”

“But about Jack—­Mr. Raynor?  Don’t you know—­”

“I am ashamed to say, darling, that it was through that unworthy person’s suggestion that I came here from Vienna.”

Irene, they have roped in your affectionate friend,

MARY JANE DEMENT.

P.S.—­The worst of it is that there is no mystery; that was the invention of Jack Raynor, to arouse my curiosity.  James is not a Thug.  He solemnly assures me that in all his wanderings he has never set foot in Sepoy.

THE EYES OF THE PANTHER

I

ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS MARRY WHEN INSANE

A man and a woman—­nature had done the grouping—­sat on a rustic seat, in the late afternoon.  The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate—­a man at whom one would look again.  The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with something in her figure and movements suggesting the word “lithe.”  She was habited in a gray gown with odd brown markings in the texture.  She may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied attention to all else.  They were gray-green, long and narrow, with an expression defying analysis.  One could only know that they were disquieting.  Cleopatra may have had such eyes.

The man and the woman talked.

“Yes,” said the woman, “I love you, God knows!  But marry you, no.  I cannot, will not.”

“Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a reason.  I’ve a right to know, to understand, to feel and prove my fortitude if I have it.  Give me a reason.”

“For loving you?”

The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor.  That did not stir any sense of humor in the man.

“No; there is no reason for that.  A reason for not marrying me.  I’ve a right to know.  I must know.  I will know!”

He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his face a frown—­it might have been called a scowl.  He looked as if he might attempt to learn by strangling her.  She smiled no more—­merely sat looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly without emotion or sentiment.  Yet it had something in it that tamed his resentment and made him shiver.