“Nevertheless, I bend my energies henceforth to his capture and punishment.”

“Because he is my lover?  Or because he may be a criminal?  Ask that question of your honor.  Answer it to your own conscience, and to the noble heart of the trusting woman you asked to become your wife.  Mr. Dunbar, you must leave me now; my strength is almost spent.”

Baffled, exasperated, he approached the table and took something from his vest-pocket.

“I hold my honor flawless, and with the sanction of my conscience I prefer to answer to you—­you alone—­because he is your lover, I will have his life.”

She smiled, and her eyes drooped; but there was strange emphasis in her words as she clasped her hands: 

“God keep my lover now and forever.  Mr. Dunbar, when you discover him, I have no fear that you will harm one hair in his dear head.”

“If you knew all you have cost me, you might understand why I will never forego my compensation.  I bide my time; but I shall win.  You asked me, as a special favor, to preserve and secure for you something which you held very valuable.  Because no wish of yours can ever be forgotten, I have complied with your request and brought you this ‘precious souvenir’ of a tender past.”

He tore away the paper wrapping, and held toward her the meerschaum pipe, then dropped it on the table as though it burned his fingers.

At sight of it, a sudden faintness made the girl reel, and she put her hand to her throat, as if to loosen a throttling touch.  Her eyes filled, and in a whirling mist she seemed to see the beloved face of the father long dead, of the gay, beautiful young brother who had wrought her ruin.  Weakness overpowered her, and sinking to her knees, she drew the pipe closer, laid it against her cheek, folded her arms over it on the table and bowed her head.

What a host of mocking phantoms leaped through the portals of the Bygone—­babbling of the glorious golden dawn that was whitening into a radiant morning, when the day-star fell back below the horizon, and night devoured the new-born day.  Memory comes, sometimes, in the guise of an angel, wearing fragrant chaplets, singing us the perfect harmonies of a hallowed past; but oftener still, as a fury scourging with serpents; and always over her shoulder peers the wan face and pitying eyes of a divine Regret.

The sun had gone down behind the dense pine forest stretching beyond the prison, but the sky was a vast shifting flame of waning rose and deepening scarlet, and the glow from the West still defied the shadows gathering in the cell.  Beryl was so still, that Mr. Dunbar feared she had fainted from exhaustion.

He stepped to her side, and laid his hand on the bronzed head, smoothing caressingly yet reverently the short, silky hair.  Ah, the unfathomable tenderness with which he bent over the only woman he ever loved; the intolerable pain of the thought that after all he might lose her.  He heard the shuddering sob that broke from her overtaxed and aching heart, and despite his jealous rage he felt unmanned.  When she raised her face, tears hung on her lashes.