and I fear that she has betrayed me.  I established a practice in another town in another State, and there I met Clara.  She has told me that she informed you of the fact that she was my wife, but not of our reasons for concealing it.  Just before we were married I became practically certain that Clemency’s father had gained in some way information that led him to suspect, if not to be absolutely certain, that his child had not died with his wife.  I had a widowed sister, Mrs. Ewing, who lived in Iowa with her only daughter just about Clemency’s age.  Just before our marriage she decided to remove to England to live with some relatives of her deceased husband.  They had considerable property, and she had very little.  I begged her to go secretly, or rather to hint that she was going East to live with me, which she did.  Nobody in the little Iowa village, so far as I knew, was aware of the fact that my sister and daughter had gone to England, and not East to live with me.  Clara and I were married privately in an obscure little Western hamlet, and came East at once.  We have lived in various localities, being driven from one to another by the danger of Clemency’s father ascertaining the truth; and my wife has always been known as Mrs. Ewing, and Clemency as her daughter.  It has been a life of constant watchfulness and deception, and I have been bound hand and foot.  Even had Clemency’s father not been so exceedingly careful that it would have been difficult to reach him by legal methods, there was the poor child to be considered, and the ignominy which would come upon her at the exposure of her father.  I have done what I could.  I am naturally a man who hates deception, and wishes above all things to lead a life with its windows open and shades up, but I have been forced into the very reverse.  My life has been as closely shuttered and curtained as my house.  I have been obliged to force my own wife to live after the same fashion.  Now the cause for this secrecy is removed, but as far as she is concerned, the truth must still be concealed for Clemency’s sake.  It must not be known that that dead man was her father, and the very instant we let go one thread of the mystery the whole fabric will unravel.  Poor Clara can never be acknowledged openly as my wife, the best and most patient wife a man ever had, and under a heavier sentence of death this moment than the utmost ingenuity of man could contrive.”  Gordon groaned, and let his head sink upon his hands.

“She told me some time ago that she was ill,” James said pityingly.

“Ill?  She has been upon the executioner’s block for years.  It is not illness; that is too tame a word for it.  It is torture, prolonged as only the evil forces of Nature herself can prolong it.”

Gordon rose and shook himself angrily.  “I am keeping her now almost constantly under morphine,” he said.  “She has suffered more lately.  The attacks have been more frequent.  There has never been the slightest possibility of a surgical operation.  From the very first it was utterly hopeless, and if it had been the dog there, I should have put a bullet through his head and considered myself a friend.”  Gordon gazed with miserable reflection at the dog.  “I am glad that the direct cause of that man’s death was not what it might have been,” he said.