Aunt Agatha sniffed and closed the window.

“I shan’t worry!” she said flatly.  “I shan’t do it.  If Carl comes home with a tree on his spine, it’s his own concern.  Why I should have to endure all this, however, I can’t for the life of me see.  I’ve one consolation anyway.  A good part of my life’s over.  Death will be a welcome relief after what I’ve gone through!”

Shrugging as the window closed Carl drove on rapidly down the driveway.

It pleased him to ride madly with the wind and storm.  The gale, laden with dust and grit, bit and stung and tore rudely at his coat and hair.  The great lamps of the car flashed brilliantly ahead, revealing the wind-beaten grasses by the wayside.  Somewhere back in his mind there was a troublesome stir of conscience.  It had bothered him for days.  It had driven him irresistibly to-night at dinner to speak of visiting his cousin’s camp, though he bit his lip immediately afterward in a flash of indecision.  The turbulent night had seemed of a sort to think things over.  Moonlit fields and roads were enervating.  Storm whipping a man’s blood into fire and energy—­biting his brain into relentless activity!—­there was a thing for you.

Whiskey did not help.  Last night it had treacherously magnified the voice of conscience into a gibing roar.

Money!  Money!  The ray of the lamps ahead, the fork of the lightning, the flickering gaslight there at the crossroads, they were all the color of gold and like gold—­of a flame that burned.  Yes, he must have money.  No matter what the voice, he must have money.

At the crossroads he halted suddenly.  To the south now lay his cousin’s camp, to the north the storm.

Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north.  A conscience was a luxury for a rich man.  Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions, breed its own results.

It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now for weeks.  Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.

Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.

But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and mockery.

Very well, then; he would tell Diane of the yellowed paper; he would tell her to-night.  However he played the game there was gold at the end.