He shook himself again as a dog shakes off water.  He laughed a miserable laugh.  “Well,” he said, “Clemency is free now.  She can go her ways as she will.  You see she resembled her mother so closely that I had to guard her from even the sight of her father.  He would have known the truth at once.  Clemency is free, but I have paid an awful price for her freedom and for your life.  If I had not done what you doubtless know I did that night, you would have been shot, and it would have been a struggle between myself and her father, with the very good chance of my being killed, and Clara and the girl left defenseless.  His revolver carried six deaths in it.  It would all have depended upon the quickness of the dog, and I should have left too much hanging upon that.”

“I don’t see what else you could do,” James said in a low voice.  He was pale himself.  He did not blame Gordon.  He felt that he himself, in Gordon’s place, would have done as he had done, and yet he felt as if faced close to a horror of murder and death, and he knew from the look upon the other man’s countenance that it was the same with him.

“I saw no other way,” Gordon said in a broken voice, “but—­but I don’t know whether I am a murderer or an executioner, and I never shall know.  God help me!  Well,” he added with a sigh, “what is done, is done.  Let us go to bed.”

James said when they parted at his room door that he hoped Mrs. Ewing would have a comfortable night.

“Yes, she will,” replied Gordon quietly.  Then he gave the young man’s hand a warm clasp.  “God bless you!” he whispered.  “If this had turned you against the child, it would have driven me madder than I am now.  I love her as if she were my own.  You and your loyalty are all I have to hold to.”

“You can hold to that to the end,” James returned with warmth, and he looked at Gordon as he might have looked at his own father.

Late as it was, he wrote that night to his own father and mother, telling them of his engagement to Clemency.  There now can be no possible need for secrecy with regard to it.  James, in spite of his vague sense of horror, felt an exhilaration at the thought that now all could be above board, that the shutters could be flung open.  He felt as if an incubus had rolled from his mental consciousness.  Clemency herself experienced something of the same feeling.  She appeared at the breakfast-table the next morning with her hat.  “Uncle says I may go with you on your rounds,” she said to James.  She beamed, and yet there was a troubled and puzzled expression on her pretty face.  When she and James had started, and were moving swiftly along the country road, she said suddenly, “Will you tell me something?”

James hesitated.

“Will you?” she repeated.

“I can’t promise, dear,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked pettishly.

“Because it might be something which I ought not to tell you.”