With dragging feet, Milo Standish turned back, and reentered the house, as he had gone out of it.

“I am a coward!” he said, heavily.  “I could have saved him.  Or we could have fought, back to back, till we were killed.  It would have been a white man’s way of dying.  I am a coward!”

He sank down in a chair and buried his bearded face in his hands.  No one contradicted him or made any effort at comfort.  Claire, deathly pale, still crouched forward, staring blindly at the moveless white figure at the head of the path.

“Peace to his soul!” said Brice, in a hushed voice, adding under his breath:  “If he had one!”

Then, laying his hand gently on Claire’s arm, he drew her away from the window and shut the blinds on the sight which had so horrified them.

“Go and lie down, Miss Standish,” he bade her.  “This has been an awful thing for you or any other woman to look on.  Take a double dose of aromatic spirits of ammonia, and tell one of the maids to bring you some black coffee ....  Do as I say, please!” he urged, as she looked mutely at him and made no move to obey.  “You may need your strength and your nerve.  And—­try to think of anything but what you’ve just seen.  Remember, he was an outlaw, a murderer, the man who wrecked your brother’s honorable life, a thorough-paced blackguard, a man who merits no one’s pity.  More than that, he was one of Germany’s cleverest spies, during the war.  His life was forfeit, then, for the injury he did his country.  I am not heartless in speaking this way of a man who is dead.  I do it, so that you may not feel the horror of his killing as you would if a decent man had died, like that.  Now go, please.”

Tenderly, he led her to the foot of the stairs.  The house man was just returning from the locking of the upstairs shutters.  To him Brice gave the order for coffee to be taken to her room and for one of the maids to attend her there.

As she passed dazedly up the stairs, Gavin stood over the broken giant who still sat inert and huddled in his chair, face in hands.

“Buck up!” said Brice, impatiently.  “If you can grieve for a man who made you his slave and—­”

“Grieve for him?” repeated Standish, raising his haggard face.  “Grieve for him?  I thank God he’s dead.  I hated him as I never hated any one else or thought I could hate any one!  I hated him as we hate the man in whose power we are and who uses us as helpless pawns in his dirty game.  I’d have killed him long ago, if I had had the nerve, and if he hadn’t made me believe he had a charmed life.  His death means freedom to me--glorious freedom!  It’s for my own foul cowardice that I’m grieving.  The cowardice that held me here while a man’s life might have been saved by me.  That’s going to haunt me as long as I live.”