The dark crimson of the flexible covers, as soft and slippery to the touch as a snake’s skin, was perhaps the fitting symbol of the darker story that lay coiled within.  With a gesture of repulsion, as if some such fancy had flitted through his mind, Mr. Slocum tossed the note-book on the desk in front of him, and stood a few minutes moodily watching the reflets of the crinkled leather as the afternoon sunshine struck across it.  Beneath his amazement and indignation he had been chilled to the bone by Mr. Taggett’s brutal confidence.  It was enough to chill one, surely; and in spite of himself Mr. Slocum began to feel a certain indefinable dread of that little crimson-bound book.

Whatever it contained, the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett’s baleful fancies.  Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked the office door behind him, and wandered down to Dundon’s drug-store to kill the intervening hour before supper-time.  Dundon’s was the aristocratic lounging place of the village,—­the place where the only genuine Havana cigars in Stillwater were to be had, and where the favored few, the initiated, could get a dash of hochheimer or cognac with their soda-water.

At supper, that evening, Mr. Slocum addressed scarcely a word to Margaret, and Margaret was also silent.  The days were dragging heavily with her; she was missing Richard.  Her own daring travels had never extended beyond Boston or Providence; and New York, with Richard in it, seemed drearily far away.  Mr. Slocum withdrew to his chamber shortly after nine o’clock, and, lighting the pair of candles on the dressing-table, began his examination of Mr. Taggett’s memoranda.

At midnight the watchman on his lonely beat saw those two candles still burning.

XX

Mr. Taggett’s diary was precisely a diary,—­disjoined, full of curt, obscure phrases and irrelevant reflections,—­for which reason it will not be reproduced here.  Though Mr. Slocum pondered every syllable, and now and then turned back painfully to reconsider some doubtful passage, it is not presumed that the reader will care to do so.  An abstract of the journal, with occasional quotation where the writer’s words seem to demand it, will be sufficient for the narrative.

In the opening pages Mr. Taggett described his novel surroundings with a minuteness which contrasted oddly with the brief, hurried entries further on.  He found himself, as he had anticipated, in a society composed of some of the most heterogeneous elements.  Stillwater, viewed from a certain point, was a sort of microcosm, a little international rag-fair to which nearly every country on earth had contributed one of its shabby human products.  “I am moving,” wrote Mr. Taggett, “in an atmosphere in which