"There's nobody stirring; now's your time, Ransom."

The moment for action had arrived.

Ransom stepped into the hall. As he passed Hazen, the latter whispered:

"Don't forget that last downward quirk. That was the line she always

emphasized."

Ransom gave him an annoyed look. His nerves as well as his feelings were

on a keen stretch, and this persistence of Hazen's was more than he could

bear.

"I'll not forget the least detail," he answered shortly, and passed

quickly down the hall, while Hazen watched him through the crack of the

door, and the lawyer watched Hazen.

Suddenly Mr. Harper's brow wrinkled. Hazen had uttered such a sigh of

relief that the lawyer was startled. In another moment Ransom re-entered

the room.

"She's coming," said he, striving to hide his extreme emotion. "I heard

her voice in the hall beyond."

Hazen sprang to the door which Ransom had carefully closed, and was about

to fall on his knees before the keyhole when he suddenly stiffened

himself and, turning towards the lawyer, cried with a new strain of

loftiness in his tone:

"You. You shall do the looking, only promise to be very minute in your

description of her behavior. It's a great trust I repose in you. See that

you honor it."

The revulsion of feeling caused in the lawyer by this show of confidence

was not perceptible. But it softened his step as well as his manner as he

crossed to do the other's bidding.

The remaining two stood at his side breathless, waiting for his first

word.

It came in a whisper:

"She's approaching her room. She looks tired. Her eyes are stealing this

way;--no, they are resting on her own door. She sees the sign. She stands

staring at it, but not like a person who has ever seen it before. It's

the stare of an uneducated woman who runs upon something she does not

understand. Now she touches it with one finger and glances up and down

the hall with a doubtful shake of the head. Now she is running to another

door, now to another. She is looking to see if this scrawl is to be found

anywhere else; she even casts her eye this way--I feel like leaving my

post. If I do, you may know that she's coming--No, she's back at her own

door and--gentlemen, her bringing up or rather coming up asserts itself.

She has put her palm to her mouth and is vigorously rubbing off the

marks."

The next instant Mr. Harper rose. "She's gone into her room," said he.

"Listen and you will hear her key click in the lock."

Ransom sank into a seat; Hazen had walked to the window. Presently he

turned.

"I am convinced," said he. "I will not trouble you gentlemen further.

Mr. Ransom, I condole with you upon your loss. My sister was a woman of

uncommon gifts."

Mr. Ransom bowed. He had no words for this man at a moment of such

extreme excitement. He did not even note the latent sting hidden in the

other's seeming tribute to Georgian. But the lawyer did and Hazen

perceived that he did, for pausing in his act of crossing the room, he

leaned for a moment on the table with his eyes down, then quickly

raising them remarked to that gentleman:

"I am going to leave by the midnight train for New York. To-morrow I

shall be on the ocean. Will it be transgressing all rules of propriety

for me to ask the purport of my sister's will? It is a serious matter to

me, sir. If she has left me anything--"

"She has _not_," emphasized the lawyer.

A shadow darkened the disappointed man's brow. His wound swelled and his

eyes gleamed ironically as he turned them upon Ransom.

Instantly that gentleman spoke.

"I have received but a moiety," said he. "You need not envy me the

amount."

"Who has it then?" briskly demanded the startled man. "Who? who? _She?_"

Mr. Harper never knew why he did it. He was reserved as a man and,

usually, more than reserved as a lawyer, but as Hazen lifted his hands

from the table and turned to leave, he quietly remarked:

"The chief legatee--the one she chose to leave the bulk of her very large

fortune to--is a man we none of us know. His name is Josiah Auchincloss."

The change which the utterance of this name caused in Hazen's expression

threw them both into confusion.

"Why didn't you tell me that in the beginning?" he cried. "I needn't have

wasted all this time and effort."

His eyes shone, his poor lips smiled, his whole air was jubilant. Both

Mr. Harper and his client surveyed him in amazement. The lines so fast

disappearing from his brow were beginning to reappear on theirs.

"Mr. Harper," this hard-to-be-understood man now declared, "you may

safely administer the estate of my sister. She is surely dead."

CHAPTER XXIII

A STARTLING DECISION

Before Mr. Ransom and the lawyer had recovered from their astonishment,

Hazen had slipped from the room. As Mr. Harper started to follow, he saw

the other's head disappearing down the staircase leading to the office.

He called to him, but Hazen declined to turn.

"No time," he shouted back. "I shall have to make use of somebody's

automobile now, to get to the Ferry in time."

The lawyer did not persist, not at that moment; he went back to his

client and they had a few hurried words; then Mr. Harper went below and

took up his stand on the portico. He was determined that Hazen should not

leave the place without some further explanation.

It was light where he stood and he very soon felt that this would not

do, so he slipped back into the shade of a pillar, and seeing, from the

bustle, that Hazen was likely to obtain the use of the one automobile

stored in the stable, he waited with reasonable patience for his

reappearance in the road before him.

Meanwhile he had confidence in Ransom, who he felt sure was watching

them both from the window overhead. If he should fail in getting in

the word he wanted, Ransom was pledged to shout it out without regard

to appearances. But this was not likely to occur. He knew his own

persistency to equal Hazen's. Nothing should stop the momentary interview

he had promised himself.

Ah! A well-known whirr and clatter is heard. The automobile was leaving

the stable. Hazen was already in it and the man who had come up from New

York was with him. This was bad; they would flash by--No; he would not be

balked thus. Stepping out into the road, he stopped full in the glare of

the office lights and held up his hand. They could not but see him and

they did. The chauffeur reversed the lever and the machine stopped to

the accompaniment of low muttered oaths from Hazen, which were rather

disagreeable than otherwise to Harper's ear.

"One word," said he, approaching to the side where Hazen sat. "I thought

you ought to know before leaving that we can take no proceedings in the

matter we were speaking of till we have undisputed proof that your sister

is dead. That we may not get for a long time, possibly never. If you are

interested in having this Auchincloss receive his inheritance, you had

better prepare both yourself and him for a long wait. The river seems

slow to give up its dead."

The quiver of impatience which had shaken Hazen at the first word had

settled into a strange rigidity.

"One moment," he said in a command to the chauffeur at his side. Then in

a low, strangely sounding whisper to Harper: "They think the body's in

the Devil's Cauldron. Nothing can get it out if it is. Would some proof

of its presence there be sufficient to settle the fact of her death?"

"That would depend. If the proof was unmistakable, it might pass in the

Surrogate's Court. What is the matter, Hazen?"

"Nothing." The tone was hollow; the whole man sat like an image of death.

"I--I'm thinking--weighing--" he uttered in scattered murmurs. Then

suddenly, "You're not deceiving me, Harper. Some proof will be necessary,

and that very soon, for this man Auchincloss to realize the money?"

"Yes," the monosyllable was as dry as it was short. Harper's patience

with this unnatural brother was about at an end.

"And who will venture to obtain this proof for us? No one. Not even

Ransom would venture down into that watery hole. They say it is almost

certain death," babbled Hazen.

Harper kept silence. Strange forces were at work. The head of another

gruesome tragedy loomed vaguely through the shadows of this already

sufficiently tragic mystery.

"Go on!" suddenly shouted Hazen, leaning forward to the chauffeur. But

the next instant his hand was on the man's sleeve. "No, I have changed my

mind. Here, Staples," he called out as a man came running down the steps,

"take my bag and ask the landlady to prepare me a room. I'll not try for

the train to-night." Then as the man at his side leaped to the ground, he

turned to Harper and remarked quietly, but in no common tone:

"The steamer must sail without me. I'll stay in this place a while and

prove the death of Georgian Ransom myself."

CHAPTER XXIV

THE DEVIL'S CAULDRON

The solemnity of Hazen's whole manner impressed Mr. Harper strongly. As

soon as the opportunity offered he cornered the young man in the office

where he had taken refuge, and giving him to understand that further

explanations must pass between them before either slept, he drew him

apart and put the straight question to him:

"Who is Josiah Auchincloss?"

The answer was abrupt, almost menacing in its emphasis and tone.

"A trunk-maker in St. Louis. A man she was indebted to."

"How indebted to--a trunk-maker?"

"That I cannot, do not desire to state. It is enough that she felt she

owed him the bulk of her fortune. Though this eliminates me from benefits

of a wealth I had some rights to share, I make no complaint. She knew her

business best, and I am disposed to accept her judgment in the matter

without criticism."

"You are?" The tone was sharp, the sarcasm biting. "I can understand

that. For Auchincloss, in this will, read Hazen; but how about her

husband? How about her friends and the general community? Do you not

think they will ask why a beautiful and socially well-placed young woman

like your sister should leave so large a portion of her wealth to an

obscure man in another town, of whom her friends and even her business

agent have never heard? It would have been better if she had left you her

thousands directly."

The smile which was Hazen's only retort was very bitter.

"You drew up her will," said he. "You must have reasoned with her on this

very point as you are now trying to reason with me?"

The lawyer waved this aside.

"I didn't know at that time the social status of the legatee; nor did I

know her brother then as well as I do now."

"You do not know me now."

"I know that you are very pale; that the determination you have just made

has cost you more than you perhaps are willing to state. That there is

mystery in your past, mystery in your present, and, possibly, mystery

threatening your future, and all in connection with your great desire for

this money."

Hazen made a forcible gesture, but whether of denial or depreciation, it

was not easy to decide.

"Would it not then be better for all parties," pursued the lawyer, "for

you to give me some idea of the great obligation under which your sister

lay to this man, that I may have an answer ready when people ask me why

she passed you so conspicuously by, in order to enrich this stranger?"

"The story is not mine. Had she wished you to know it, she would have

confided it to you herself. I must decline--"

Mr. Harper interrupted the other impressively. "Do you realize what a

shadow may be thrown upon your sister's memory by this reticence on your

part? Her death was suggestive enough without the complications you

mention. In justice to your relationship you should speak. If, as I

think, the money is really meant for you, say so. The subterfuge may be

difficult of explanation, but it will not hurt her memory as much as this

extraordinary silence on your part."

"I am sorry," began Hazen. But Harper cut him short.

"You expect the money--you yourself," said he. "Nothing else would force

you into an attempt so perilous. You would risk death. Risk something

less final; risk your place in my esteem, your standing among men, and

confess the full truth about this matter. If it involves crime--why, I'm

a lawyer and can see you through better than you can win through by your

own misdirected efforts. The truth, my lad, the truth, nothing else will

serve you."

The look he received he will never forget.

"You are a man of limited experience, Mr. Harper," were the words which

accompanied it. "You would not understand the truth, Georgian or me.

Ransom might, but I shall not even risk Ransom's discretion. Now this

is all I am going to say about this matter. Georgian's last will and

testament, followed though it was by suicide, was a perfectly regular

one. The only impediment to its being so recognized and acted upon is the

doubt as to her actual decease. If the body of my poor young sister has

become lodged in the Devil's Cauldron, I am going there to seek it. As

the project calls for courage and, above all, a good condition of body

and mind, I shall be obliged to you if you will allow me the benefit of

the sleep I most certainly need. To-morrow I may have something more to

say to you, and I may not. Perhaps I shall want to make _my will_, who

knows?" And with a smile full of sarcastic meaning, he pushed Mr.

Harper's arm aside and made for the staircase, up which he presently

vanished without another attempt on the lawyer's part to hold him back.

A few minutes later the lawyer was getting what information he could

about the so-called Devil's Cauldron.

It seems that this was a very deep hole in which, on account of the rocky

formation surrounding it, the water swept in an eddy which had the force

of a whirlpool. No one had ever sounded its depths and nothing had ever

been seen again which had once been sucked into its deathly hollow. That

Georgian's body had found its everlasting grave there, many had believed

from the first, and if the conviction had not yet been publicly expressed

it was out of consideration for Mr. Ransom, to whose hopes it could but

ring a final knell.

"Where is the hole? How far from the waterfall?" queried Mr. Harper.

"A good mile," muttered one man. "Quite around the bend of the stream.

It's a horrid place, sir. We've always been mortal careful about rowing

down that side of the river. Children are never allowed to. Only a man's

strength could get him free again if he once struck the eddy."

"Would anything floating down from the falls be apt to strike this eddy?"

"Very apt. It would be a miracle if it didn't. That is why we all turned

out so willingly the first day. We knew that if Mrs. Ransom's body was to

be found at all, it would be found then; another day it would be beyond

our reach."

"You say that no one has ever sounded the depths of that hole. Has any

one ever tried to?"

"More than once. Scientific men and others."

"Did they ever emerge--any of them?"

"Yes, one, a powerful sort of chap with Indian blood in him. But he

didn't advise any one to try it; said the knowledge wasn't worth the

strain to heart and muscle."

"What was the knowledge? We can imagine the strain."

"Oh, he said as how the walls of the vortex--didn't he call it a

vortex--was all stone, and he spoke of a ledge--I didn't hear what

else."

"To go down there a man would have to take his life in his hand, I see.

Well, I don't think I will try," dryly observed the lawyer as he left the

room.

He could no longer hide his excitement at the thought that Hazen

meditated this undertaking.

"How he must want money!" thought he. That a man should face such a

horror for another man's profit did not seem likely enough to engage his

consideration for a moment.

Lawyer Harper knew the world--or thought he did.

Next day the whole town was thrown into a hubbub. Word had gone out

through every medium possible to so small a place, that Alfred Hazen,

Georgian's long-lost brother, was going to dare Death Eddy in a final

attempt to recover his sister's body.

PART IV

The Man of Mystery

CHAPTER XXV

DEATH EDDY

It was a gray day, chill and ominous. As the three most interested in the

event came together on the road facing the point from which Hazen had

decided to make his desperate plunge, the dreariness of the scene was

reflected in the troubled eye of the lawyer and that of the still more

profoundly affected Ransom. Only Hazen gazed unmoved. Perhaps because

the spot was no new one to him, perhaps because an unsympathetic sky,

a stretch of rock, the swirl of churning waters without any of the

lightness and color which glancing sunlight gives, meant for him but one

thing--the thing upon which he had fixed his mind, his soul.

The rocky formation into which the stream ran at this point as into a

pocket, revealed itself in the bald outlines of the point which, curving

half-way upon itself, held in its cold embrace the unseen vortex. One

tree, and one only, disturbed the sky line. Stark and twisted into an

unusual shape from the steady blowing of the prevalent east winds, it

imprinted itself at once upon the eye and unconsciously upon the

imagination. To some it was the keeper of that hell-gate; the contorted

sentinel of bygone woes and long-buried horrors, if not the gnomish

genius of others yet to come. To-day it was the sign-post to a strange

deed--the courting of an uncanny death that one of the many secrets

hidden in that hole of miseries might be unlocked.

Under this tree a small group of strong and determined men was already

collected; not as spectators but helpers in the adventurous attempt about

to be undertaken by their old friend and playmate. The spectators had

been barred from the point and stood lined up in the road overlooking the

eddy. They were numerous and very eager. Hazen's brows drew together in

his first exhibition of feeling, as he saw women and even children in the

crowd, and caught the expression of morbid anticipation with which they

all turned as he stepped with his two associates over the rope which had

been stretched across the base of the out-curving head line.

[Illustration: "Cormorants!" escaped his lips. "They look for a feast

of death, but they will be disappointed."]

"Cormorants!" escaped his lips. "They look for a feast of death, but

they will be disappointed." He was almost bitter. "I shall survive this

plunge. I have no wish for my death to be the holiday for a hundred

gloating eyes, I am not handsome enough. When I die, it will be quietly,

with some hand near, kind enough to cover my poor face with a napkin."

Harper and Ransom both remembered this remark a little while later.

"Mr. Hazen?" It was Harper who spoke. They had passed a little thicket

of brush and were drawing near the group under the tree. "Have you duly

considered what you are about to do? I have talked with several men of

judgment and experience about this attempt, and they all say it can have

but one termination."

"I know. That is because they know little or nothing of the life I have

led since I left this town. There is not a man amongst them so slight and

seemingly frail of figure as myself, but none of them, not one, has been

so often up to the very gates of death and escaped, as I have. My

schooling has been long and severe, perhaps in preparation for this day.

I have been through fire; I have been through water. The swirling of my

own native stream does not appall me. I rather welcome it; it is but

another experience."

"But for money?" broke in Ransom. "You acknowledge it is for no other

purpose. Will it pay? I own that in my eyes no amount of money could pay

a man for so superhuman a risk as this. Take a few thousands from me--I

had rather give them to you than see you leap into that water opening

beneath us like a hungry maw."

Hazen stood silent, his eye glistening, his hand almost outstretched.

Harper thought he would yield; the offer must have struck him as generous

and very tempting--a good excuse for a hot-headed man to withdraw from a

very doubtful adventure. But he did not know Hazen. This latter advanced

his hand and squeezed Ransom's warmly, but his answer, when he was ready

to give one, conveyed no intention of a change of mind.

"Will your thousands amount to a clean million?" he smiled. "That is the

amount, I believe, bequeathed by your wife to Mr. Auchincloss. Nothing

less will suffice. Yet I thank you, Ransom."

The latter bowed and fell a little behind the others. The struggle in his

mind had been severe; it was severe yet; he did not know but that it was

his duty to stop this Hazen from his intended action by force. He was not

sure but that the onus of this whole desperate undertaking would yet fall

upon him. Certainly it would fall upon his conscience if the end was

fatal. He had had proof of that in the long night of wakeful misery he

had just passed; a night in which he had faced the furies; in which this

inexorable question had forced itself upon him despite every effort on

his part to evade it.

Why had he, a humane man, consented to this attempt on the part of the

devoted Hazen? That his mind might be free to mourn his beautiful young

bride whose fatal and mysterious secret he was still as far from knowing

as in the hour he turned to welcome her to their first home and found her

fled from his arms and heart? Or had this suspense, this feeling of

standing now, as never before, at the opening door of fate, a deeper

significance, a more active meaning? Was this meditated test a crucial

one, because it opened to him the only possible releasement of soul and

conscience to the undivided care of one who had no other refuge in life

save that offered by his devotion? The horror of this self-probing was

still upon him as he followed Hazen's slight and virile figure across the

rocks, but it fled as he felt the spray of the tossing waters dash its

chilling reminder in his face.

The event was upon him and he must add to his former actions that of

a complete and determined opposition to the risk proposed or possibly

forfeit his peace of mind forever. Quickening his pace, he reached Hazen

and the lawyer just as the men awaiting them had advanced on their side.

Instantly he knew it was too late. There was neither time nor opportunity

for any weak protests on his part now. Older men were speaking; men who

knew the river, the danger, and the man, but even they said nothing to

him in way of dissuasion. They only pointed out what especial points of

suction were to be avoided, and showed him the chain they had brought for

his waist and how he was to pull upon it the very instant he felt his

senses or his strength leaving him.

He answered as a courageous man might, and making ready by taking off his

coat and shoes he gave himself into their hands for the proper fastening

on of the chain. Then, while the murmur of expectation rose from the

crowd on the river bank, he stepped back to Mr. Ransom and whispered

hurriedly in his ear:

"You have a good heart, a better heart than I ever gave you credit for.

Promise that in case I never come out of those waters alive, that you

will put no obstacle in the way of Mr. Auchincloss inheriting his fortune

in good time. He's a man worthy of all the assistance which money can

bring. _You_ do not need her wealth; Anitra--well, she will be cared for,

but Auchincloss--promise--brother."

Ransom half drew back in his amazement. Then started forward again. This

man whom he had always distrusted, whom he had looked upon as Georgian's

possible enemy, certainly his own, was looking into his eyes with a gaze

of trust, almost of affection. The money was not for himself; he showed

it by the noble, almost grand look with which he waited for his answer;

a look that carried conviction despite Ransom's prejudice and great

dislike.

"You will give me that much additional nerve for the task lying before

me?" he added. And Ransom could only bow his head. The man's mastery was

limitless; it had reached and moved even him.

Another moment and a gasp went up from fifty or more throats. Hazen had

taken the chain in his hand, walked to the edge of the rock and slipped

into the quietest water he saw there.

"Strike left!" called out a voice. And he struck left. The eddy seized

him and they could see his head moving slowly about in the great circle

which gradually grew smaller and smaller till he suddenly disappeared. A

groan muffled with horror went up from the shore. But the man who held

the chain lifted up his hand, and silence--more pregnant of anticipation

than any sound--held that whole crowd rigid. The man played out the

chain; Harper stared at the seething, tumbling water, but Ransom looked

another way. The torture in his soul was taking shape, the shape of a

ghost rising from those tossing waters. Suddenly the pent-in breath of

fifty breasts found its way again to the lips.

The men who held the chain were pulling it in with violent reaches. It

dragged more slowly, stuck, loosened itself, and finally brought into

sight a face white as the foam it rose amongst.

"Dead! Drowned!" the whisper went around.

But when Hazen was dragged ashore and Ransom had thrown himself at his

feet, he saw that he yet lived, and lived triumphantly. Ransom could not

have told more; it was for others to see and point out the smile that

sweetened the wan lips, and the passion with which he held against his

breast some sodden and shapeless object which he had rescued from those

awful depths, and which, when spread out and clean of sand, betrayed

itself as that peculiar article of woman's clothing, a small side bag.

"I remember that bag," said Harper. "I saw it, or one exactly like it, in

Mrs. Ransom's hand when she got into the coach the day we all rode up

from the ferry. What will he have to say about it? and could he have seen

the body from which it has evidently been torn?"

CHAPTER XXVI

HAZEN

"An unfathomable man," grumbled Mr. Harper, entering Mr. Ransom's room in

marked disorder. "They say that he has not spoken yet; but the coroner is

with him and we shall hear something from him soon. I expect--" here the

lawyer's voice changed and his manner took on meaning--"that his report

will be final."

"Final? You mean--"

"What his fainting face showed. For all its pallor and the exhaustion it

expressed, there was triumph in its every feature. The little bag was not

all he saw in that pit of hell. You must prepare yourself for no common

ordeal, Ransom; it will take all your courage to listen to his story."

"I know." The words came with difficulty but not without a certain manly

courage. "I shall try not to make you too much trouble." Then after a

moment of oppressive silence, "Did you notice, when we all came in, the

figure of a woman disappearing up the stair way? It was Anitra's and it

paused before it reached the top, and I saw her eyes staring down at

Hazen's helpless figure with a wildness in its inquiry that has sapped

all my courage. How are we to answer that girl when she asks us what has

happened? How make her know that Hazen is her brother and that he has

just risked his life to satisfy himself and us that Georgian was really

lost in that dreadful pool."

The lawyer, darting a keen glance at the speaker, softly shook his head.

"I am not thinking of Miss Hazen," said he. "I'm wondering how far the

proof he has obtained will go." He paused, listening, then made a gesture

towards the hall. "There's some one there," he whispered.

Ransom rose, and with a quick turn of the wrist pulled open the door.

A man was standing on the threshold, a ghastly figure before which Ransom

involuntarily stepped back.

"Hazen!" he cried; then, as the other tottered, he sprang forward again

and, reaching out his hand to steady him, drew him in with the remark,

"We were expecting a summons from you. We are happy that you find

yourself able to come to us."

"The coroner has just gone. The doctors I dismissed. I have something to

say to you--to both of you," he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.

Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer.

There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality

which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very

closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind

blowing through the hall made difficult to close.

"I--" The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself. Sitting quite

still, he gazed straight before him at the open window. There was little

to be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gaze

never left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till the

movement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.

"I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me. I--" here his

voice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before,

he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slow

words with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentration

upon his subject, "I saw what I went to see--poor Georgian's body. I have

satisfied the coroner of this fact. The little bag I tore from her side

proves her identity beyond a doubt. You saw it, Mr. Harper. They tell me

that you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in the

stage-coach. But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G.

Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen. Auchincloss will get his money, and soon,

will he not? Answer me plainly, Harper. Such an experience merits some

reward. You will not make difficulties?"

"I?" The lawyer's query had a strange ring to it. He glanced from Hazen

to Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now become

more composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.

"If the proof is positive," he then went on, "you assuredly can trust

both my client and myself to remember our promise to you."

"The coroner, you say, is satisfied?"

"Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement. He is obliged to be. No one

else, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirling

eddy for confirmation of my story. And they are wise. I do not think

that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of

that vortex and come up alive. The noise--the swirl--the sense of being

sucked down--down in ever-increasing fury--but my purpose kept the life

in me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen--and

proved--"

"What's that?"

The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its way

through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with

flying papers from the large stand in the window.

"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but

immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be,"

he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazen

talking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."

But it was the window he closed, not the door.

Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most

trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to

Hazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc

it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.

"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few years

especially, passed through many perils and experienced much awful

suffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair;

but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my

mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the

sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose

bottom no man had ever sounded.

"I went in young--I have come out old. Look at my hands--they shake like

those of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the

ground an ox."

"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below the

surface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from

the shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us just

how she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know,

difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."

"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of

the unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, the

painful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom,

but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the

force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to

clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush

and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but

enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed,

and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I

was just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip. We have

spoken of this thing--a little bag which must have been fastened to her

side, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench I

gave it."

"Vivid enough; but I am sure you will tell me one thing more. Did you see

the face of this body as well as the arm? It would greatly add to the

strength of your testimony if you could describe it."

Ransom, who had been watching Hazen, cast a sudden look back at the

lawyer as he dropped these insinuating words. Something more than a

cold-blooded desire for truth had prompted this almost brutal

inquisition. He must know what it was, if anything in Harper's

well-controlled countenance would tell him. The result transfixed him,

for following the lawyer's gaze, which was fixed not on the man he was

addressing but on a small mirror hanging on the opposite wall, he saw

reflected in it the face and form of Anitra standing in the open

doorway behind them.

She was looking at Hazen and, as Ransom noted that look, he understood

Harper's previous caution and all that lay behind his insistent and

cold-blooded questions. For her gaze was no longer one of simple inquiry

but of horrified understanding;--_the gaze of one who heard_.

Meantime, Hazen was answering in painful gasps the lawyer's pointed

question, "Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?"

"Did I see--God help me, yes. Just a glimpse, but I knew it. Eyes that my

mother had kissed, blind--staring--glassed in awe and unspeakable fright.

The mouth, whose every curve I had studied in the old days of perfect

affection, drawn into a revolting grin and dripping with unwholesome

weeds brought down from the shallows. All strange, yet all familiar--my

sister--Georgian--dead--stark--but recognizable. Don't ask me if I saw

it. I always see it; it is before me now, the forehead--the chin--the

eyes--"

Ransom sprang to his feet, Harper also.

The girl in the doorway had gone white as death, and with outstretched

arms and frantic, haggard eyes was striving to ward off the frightful

vision conjured up by her brother's words. The movement made by the

two men recalled her in an instant to herself, and she drew back--the

hesitating, appealing, anxious-eyed girl whom they all knew. But it

was too late. Hazen had seen as well as the others, and leaping in

frenzy from his chair stood confronting her--a dominant and accusing

figure--between the quietly triumphant lawyer and the crushed, almost

unconscious Ransom.

CHAPTER XXVII

SHE SPEAKS

Hazen's face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weakness

contended with the outsweep of passion, so great and overwhelming in its

power and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to spring

from deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, as

well as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terrible

in the human mind and human experience.

Anitra's eye was spellbound by it. As it dilated upon this vision of

unspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisite

face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and

meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled

recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of

some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory

experiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.

"You _hear_!"

In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.

The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.

"You _hear_!" he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand upon

her arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. What

does it mean--Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, as

her eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague

curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor--"we have had enough

of that; you cannot deceive us--you cannot deceive _me_ twice. You played

at deafness--why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish

her from Georgian? Because you are not Anitra? Because you are Georgian

after all?"

Georgian!

The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy.

Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only

stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and

grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowly

she succumbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose of

a very strong woman. Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle to

his face. Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress,

she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read in

them the maddening truth. They were his wife's eyes; the woman before him

was indeed Georgian.

"Speak!" rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom's

face what Ransom had just realized from hers, stepped to the door and

closed it. "The time is short; I have much, very much to do. For my sake,

for the sake of this much-abused man, whom you allowed to marry you,

speak out, tell the truth at once. You are Georgian."

"Yes," fell in almost an inaudible whisper from her lips. "I am

Georgian." Then as he loosed his grasp from her arm and she was left

standing there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of the

mysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in this

avowal of her identity, wrought her brain into momentary madness, and

flinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under the

stroke of some unseen thunderbolt.

"You made me say it," she cried. "On your head be the punishment, not on

mine nor on his." Then as Hazen drew slowly back, touched in his turn by

some emotion to which neither his look nor gesture gave any clew, she

rose to her feet, and fixing him with a look of strange defiance, added

in milder but no less determined tones: "A tongue unloosed talks long and

loud. You have made me give up my secret, but I shall not stop at that. I

shall say more; tell all my dreadful history; yours--mine. I will not be

thought wicked because I undertook so great a deception. I will not have

this good man's opinion of me shaken; not for a minute; what I did, I

did for him and he shall know it whatever penalty it may incur. He is

my husband--his love to me is priceless, and I will hold it against

you--against the Cause--against Heaven--yes, and against Hell."

Here was truth. To Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding

across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself.

But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was

concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning

gesture of Ransom, could hold it back.

"Traitress!" he cried, "traitress to me and to the Cause. You thought

to escape what is inescapable. Do you know what you have done? You

have--" The rest hung in air. A sudden weakness had seized him and he

sank faltering back into a chair Harper pushed towards him, still

denouncing her, however, with lifted hand and accusing eyes, the

image--though no longer a speaking one--of the implacable and determined

avenger.

Georgian, shocked into silence, stared at him in a frenzy of complicated

emotions to which neither of them as yet had given the key capable of

relieving the maddening tension.

"It is the pool; the pool," she finally murmured. "Its waters have beaten

out your life." But he calmly shook his head.

"It is not in water to do that," he murmured. "Give me a moment. I've a

question to ask. I think a drop of liquor--"

Harper had flask in hand almost before the word had left the other's

mouth. The draft revived Hazen; he looked up at Georgian. "I believe you,

so do these men believe you. But you were not alone in this plot. Where

is Anitra? Where is the deaf and solitary one you dragged from the

streets of New York to bolster up your plot? Tell us and tell us quickly.

Where is Anitra?"

"Anitra? Do you ask that?" cried Harper, roused to speak for the first

time by his boundless amazement and indignation. "You have described the

body in the pool--a description which fits either sister, and yet you

would make this woman tell us what you have seen with your own eyes."

He might as well not have spoken. Neither he nor she seemed to hear him.

Certainly neither heeded.

"Anitra?" she repeated softly and with a strange intonation. "I am

Anitra. I am both Georgian and Anitra. There have never been two of us

since I came into this house."

CHAPTER XXVIII

FIFTEEN MINUTES

"There have never been but one of us since I came into this house."

Monstrous assertion! or so it seemed to Ransom as the whirl of his

thoughts settled and reason resumed its sway. Only one! But he had

himself seen two; so had Mrs. Deo and the maids; he could even relate the

differences between them on that first night. Yet had he ever seen them

together, or even the shadow of one at the same moment he saw the person

of the other? No, and with such an actress as she had shown herself to be

these last two days, such changes of appearance might be possible, though

why she should engage in such a deep, almost incredible plot was a

mystery to make the hair rise,--she, the tender, exquisite, the beloved

woman of his dreams.

She saw the maddening nature of his confusion and, springing to him, fell

on her knees with the imploring cry:

"Patience! Do not try to think--I will tell you. It can all be said in a

word. I was bound to this brother of mine, to do his bidding, to follow

his fortunes through life, and up to death, by promises and oaths to

which those uttered by me at the marriage altar were but toys and empty

air. Anitra, or the dream sister my misery took from the dead, was not

so bound, so I strove to secure our joy by the seeming death of Georgian

and a new life as her twin. You do not understand; you cannot. You have

no measure with which to gauge such men as my brother. But it will be

given you. There is no hope now. The weakness of a moment has undone us."

Ransom must have heard her, after events proved that he did, but he gave

no token of it. The visions that were whirling through his mind still

held it engrossed. He saw her, not as she stood before him now, trembling

and appealing, but as she had looked to him in the hall that first night,

as she had looked to him down by the mill-stream, as she had looked when

she told her story as Anitra, and later when she had faced the landlady

as Georgian, and the confusion of it all left no room in his conscience

for any other impression. But Mr. Harper, though surprised as he had

never been before in all his professional career, lost himself in no such

abyss. With the freedom which long-delayed insight into the truth gives

to a man of his positive nature and training, he left speculation and all

endeavor to reconcile events with her declaration, and plunged at once to

the obvious question of the moment.

Fixing his keen gaze on Hazen, he observed very quietly, but with an

underlying note of sarcasm:

"If this lady is your sister, Georgian Ransom, and there is no Anitra

save the fast fading memory of the child commemorated in your family's

monument, then your statement as to the body you saw under the ledge was

false?"

The answer came deliberately, unaffected both by the manner of the

accusation or by the accusation itself.

"Perfectly so," said he, "I saw no body. Perhaps my description would

have been less vivid if I had. My intention you know. This woman had

deceived me to the point of making me believe that she was indeed Anitra,

the twin, and not my millionaire sister, and Georgian's fortune being

necessary to her heir, I wished to cut short the law's delay by an

apparent identification. I never doubted from the moment this woman faced

with such well-played ignorance the mark of great meaning we had placed

upon her door, that Georgian was in the river, as you all believed. Why

then not give her a positive resting-place, since this would smooth out

all difficulties and hasten the very end for which she had apparently

sacrificed herself."

If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed

his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of

anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight

contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation.

Yet in Georgian's eyes he had lost none of his formidable qualities, for

the dismay with which she followed his words grew as she listened, and

reached its height as he added in final explanation:

"The bag I did draw out of the pool, but only because I had taken it down

there in my blouse front. Did you think a man could see that or anything

else indeed in that maddening swirl of water?"

"But it was Mrs. Ransom's bag," came from Harper in ill-disguised

amazement. Even his sang-froid was leaving him before these evidences

of a plot so deep as to awaken awe. "Where did you get it? Not from Mrs.

Ransom herself? Her own surprise is warranty for that."

"No, I got it from the river, another reason why I credited her drowning.

It was fished up from the sand, a little way from the Fall. My man found

it; I had sent him there in a vain hope that he might find evidence of

the tragedy which others had overlooked. He did, but he told no one but

me. You flung the thing too far," he remarked to Georgian. "You should

have dropped it nearer the bank. Only such a prodder as my man Ives would

ever have discovered it."

Georgian shook her head, impatient at such banalities, in the face of the

important matters they had to discuss. "To the point," she cried, "tell

these men what will clear me of everything but a wild attempt at

freedom."

"I have said what I had to say," returned her brother.

Georgian's head fell. For a moment her courage seemed to fail her.

Mr. Harper rose and locked the door.

"We must have no intruders here," said he, pausing with a certain sense

of shock, as he noticed the faint smile, full of some sinister meaning,

which for an instant twisted Hazen's lips at these words.

But the delay was but momentary. With an odd sense of haste he rushed at

once to the attack.

Stepping in front of Hazen, he observed with force and unmistakable

resolution:

"Your devotion to the legatee Auchincloss cannot possibly be explained by

any ordinary feeling of obligation. Your sister has mentioned a Cause.

Can he by any possibility be the treasurer of that Cause?"

But Hazen was as impervious to direct attack as he had been to a covert

one.

"Georgian will tell you," said he. "When a woman looks as she looks now,

and is so given over to her own personal longings that she forgets the

most serious oaths, the most binding promises, nothing can hold back her

speech. She will talk, and since this must be, let her talk now and in

my presence. But let it be briefly," he admonished her, "and with

discretion. An unnecessary word will weigh heavily in the end. You know

in what scales. You shall have just fifteen minutes."

He looked about for a clock, but seeing none drew out his watch from his

vest pocket and laid it on the table. Then he settled himself again in

his chair, with a look and gesture of imperative command towards

Georgian.

Struck with dismay, she hesitated and he had time to add: "I shall not

interrupt unless you pass the bounds where narrative ends and disclosure

begins." And Harper and Ransom, glancing up at this, wondered at his

rigidity and the almost marble-like quiet into which his restless eye and

frenzied movements had now subsided.

Georgian seemed to wonder also, for she gave him a long and piercing look

before she spoke. But once she had begun her story, she forgot to look

anywhere but at the man whose forgiveness she sought and for the

restoration of whose sympathy she was unconsciously pleading.

Her first words settled one point which up to this moment had disturbed

Ransom greatly.

"You must forget Anitra's story. It was suggested by facts in my own

life, but it was not true of me or mine in any of its particulars.

Nor must you remember what the world knows, or what my relations say

about my life. The open facts tell little of my real history, which

from childhood to the day I believed my brother dead was indissolubly

bound up in his. Though our fathers were not the same and he has

old-world blood in his veins, while I am of full American stock, we loved

each other as dearly and shared each other's life as intimately as if the

bond between us had been one in blood as it was in taste and habit. This

was when we were both young. Later, a change came. Some old papers of his

father fell into his hands. A new vision of life,--sympathies quite

remote from those which had hitherto engrossed him, led him further and

further into strange ways and among strange companions. Ignorant of what

it all meant, but more alive than ever to his influence, I blindly

followed him, receiving his friends as my friends and subscribing to such

of their convictions as they thought wise to express before me. Another

year and he and I were living a life apart, owning no individual

existence but devoting brain, heart, all we had and all we were, to the

advancement and perpetuation of an idea. I have called this idea the

Cause. Let that name suffice. I can give you no other."

Pausing, she waited for some look of comprehension from the man she

sought to enlighten. But he was yet too dazed to respond to her mute

appeal, and she was forced to continue without it. Indicating Hazen with

a gesture, she said, with her eyes still fixed on those of her husband:

"You see him now as he came from under the harrow; but in those days--I

must speak of you as you were, Alfred--he was a man to draw all eyes and

win all hearts. Men loved him, women adored him. Little as he cared for

our sex, he had but to speak, for the coldest breast to heave, the most

indifferent eye to beam. I felt his power as strong as the rest, only

differently. No woman was more his slave than I, but it was a sister's

devotion I felt, a devotion capable of being supplanted by another. But I

did not know this. I thought him my whole world and let him engross me in

his plans and share his passions for subjects I did not even seek to

understand.

"I was only seventeen, he twenty-five. It was for him to think, not me.

And he did think but to my eternal undoing. The Cause needed a woman's

help, a woman's enthusiasm. Without considering my motherless condition,

my helplessness, the immaturity of my mind, he drew me day by day into

the secret meshes of his great scheme, a scheme which, as I failed to

understand till it had absorbed me, meant the unequivocal devotion of my

whole life to the exclusion of every other hope or purpose. Favored, he

called it, favored to stand for liberty, the advancement of men, the

right of every human being to an untrammeled existence. And favored I

thought myself, till one awful day when my brother, coming suddenly into

my room, found me making plans for an innocent pleasure and told me such

things were no longer for me, that a great and immortal duty awaited me,

one that had come sooner than he expected, but which my youth, beauty,

and spirit eminently fitted me to carry on to triumph.

"I was frightened. For the first time in my memory of him he looked like

his Italian father, the man we had all tried to forget. Once while

rummaging amongst my mother's treasures I had come across a miniature of

Signor Toritti. He was a handsome man but there was something terrible in

his eye; something to make the ordinary heart stand still. Alfred's

burned with the same meaning at this moment, and as I noted his manner,

which was elevated, almost godlike, I realized the difference in our

heredity and how natural to him were the sacrifices for which my mind and

temper were as naturally unprepared. With difficulty I asked him to

explain himself, and it was with terror that I listened when he did.

He may have been made to ask, but I was not made to hear such words. He

saw my inner rebellion and stopped in mid-harangue. He has never forgiven

me the disappointment of that moment. I have never forgiven him for

making me sign away my independence, my holdings, and my life to a Cause

I did not thoroughly understand."

"Your life?" echoed Ransom, roused to involuntary expression by this

word.

"Surely not your life," echoed the lawyer, with the slow credulity of the

matter-of-fact man.

"I have said it," she murmured, her head falling on her breast. At which

token of weakness, Hazen stirred and took the words from her mouth.

"The organization," said he, "is a secret one and its code is

self-sacrifice. To the band of noble men and women, of whose integrity

and far-reaching purpose you can judge little from the whinings of a

love-sick girl, life and all personal gratifications are as dust in the

balance against the preservation and advancement of universal happiness

and the great Cause. I thought my sister, young as she was, sufficiently

great-minded to comprehend this and sufficiently great-hearted to do the

society's bidding with joy at the sacrifice. But I found her lacking,

and--" He stopped and almost lost himself again, but roused and cried

with sudden fire, "Tell what I did, Georgian."

"You took my duty on yourself," she conceded, but coldly. "That was

brotherly; that was noble, if you had not exacted a vow from me in

return, destined to lay waste my whole life. Released from this one great

duty, I was to hold myself ready to fulfil all others. At the lift of a

hand--a finger--I was to leave whatever held me and go after the one who

beckoned in the name of the Cause. No circumstances were to be

considered; no other human duty or affection. If it were to enter upon a

fuller and more adventurous life, well and good; if it were to encounter

death and the cessation of all earthly things, that was well too, and a

good to be embraced with ardor. Obedience was all, and obedience at a

mere signal! I took the oath and then--"

"Yes, _then_--" emphasized Hazen in wavering but peremptory tones.

"He told me what had led to all this misery. That as yet this compact was

between us two, and us two only. That he had considered my youth, and in

speaking of me to the Chief had held back my name even while promising

my assistance. That he should continue to consider it, by keeping my name

in reserve till he had returned from his mission, and if that mission

failed, or succeeded too well, and he did not return, I might regard

myself as freed from the Cause, unless my enlarging nature led me to

attach myself to it of my own free will. That said, he went, and for a

year I lived under the dread of his return and all the obligations that

return would entail. Then came tidings of his death, tidings for which he

may not have been responsible, but which he never contradicted, and I

thought myself free--free to enjoy life, and the fortune that had so

unexpectedly come to me; free to love and, alas! free to marry. And that

is why," she pursued, in all the anguish of a dreadful retrospect, "I

recoiled in such horror and hung, a dead weight on your arm, when on

turning from the altar where we had just pledged ourselves to mutual love

and mutual life, I saw among the faces before me the changed but still

recognizable one of my brother, and beheld him make the fatal sign which

meant, 'You are wanted. Come at once.'"

"Wretch!" issued from the frenzied lips of the half-maddened bridegroom,

as his glance flashed on Hazen. "Had you no mercy? Have you no mercy now,

that you should torture her young, credulous soul with these fanciful

obligations; obligations which no human being has any right to impose

upon another, whatsoever the Cause, holy or unholy, he represents?"

"Mercy? It is the weakness of the easy soul. There is no ease here," he

cried, touching his breast with no gentle hand.

"Then you forget my money," suggested Georgian. "Can you expect mercy

from a man who sees a million just within his grasp? I know," she

acknowledged, as Hazen lifted that same ungentle hand in haughty protest,

"that it was not for himself. I do not think Alfred would disturb a fly

for his own comfort, but he would wreck a woman's hopes, a good man's

happiness for the Cause. He admitted as much to me, _and more_, in the

interview we held that afternoon at the St. Denis. I had to go to him at

once, and I had to employ subterfuge in order to do so," she went on in

rapid explanation, as she saw her husband's eye refill with doubt under a

remembrance of the shame and anguish of that unhappy afternoon. "I had

not the courage to leave you openly at the carriage door. Besides, I

hoped to work on Alfred's pity in our interview together, or, if not

that, to buy my release and return to you a free woman. But the wound

which had changed his face for me had changed and made hard his heart. He

had other purposes for me than quiet living with a man who could have no

real interest in the Cause. The money I inherited, the rare and growing

beauty which he declared me to have, were too valuable to the brethren

for me to hope for any existence in which their interests were not

paramount. I might return to you, subject to the same authoritative beck

and call which had put me in my present position, or I might leave you at

once and forever. No half measures were possible. Was I, a bride, loving

and beloved by my husband, to listen to either of these alternatives? I

rebelled, and then the thunderbolt fell.

"I was no longer on probation, no longer subject to his will alone. I was

a fully affiliated member. That day my name had been sent to the Chief.

This meant obedience on my part or a vengeance I felt it impossible to

consider. While I lived I need never hope again for freedom without

penalty.

"'While I lived'; the words rang in my ears. I did not need to weigh

them; I knew that they were words of truth. There is no power on earth

so inescapable as that exercised by a secret society, and this one has

a terrible safeguard. None but he who keeps the list knows the members.

You, Roger, might be one, and I never suspect it, unless you chose to

give me the sign. Knowing this, I realized that my life was not worth the

purchase if I sought to cross the will of my own brother. Nor yours,

either. It was the last thought which held me. While I dutifully

listened, my mind was working out the deception which was to release me,

and when I left him it was to take the first step in the complicated plot

by which I hoped to recover my lost happiness. And I nearly succeeded.

You have seen what I have borne, what difficulties I have faced, what

discoveries eluded, but this last, this greatest ordeal, was too much. I

could not listen unmoved to a description of my own drowned body. I, who

had calculated on all, had not calculated on this. The horror overcame

me--I forgot--perhaps because God was weary of my many deceptions!"

CHAPTER XXIX

"THERE IS ONE WAY"

"Have you done?"

Hazen was on his feet and, rigid still, but oscillating from side to

side, as though his strength did not suffice to hold him quite erect, was

surveying them with eyes sunk so deeply in his head that they looked like

dying sparks reanimated for an instant by some passing breath.

The half-fainting woman he addressed did not answer. She was looking up

at Ransom for the sympathy and pardon he was as yet too dazed to show.

Hazen made a move. It was that of physical suffering sternly endured.

"Let me speak," he urged. "I have a question to ask. I must ask it now.

Who was the woman who came up from New York with you? There were two of

you then."

Without turning her head Georgian replied:

"That was Bela, my maid; the same one who personated me on the afternoon

of my wedding."

"That accounts for the coarseness of her neck," Hazen explained with a

certain grim humor to the lawyer, who had given a slight start of

surprise or humiliation. Then quietly to Georgian:

"Was it she who threw the comb and dropped your bag where my man found

it?"

"I threw the comb; threw it from my window before I uttered that loud

shriek. It did not go very far; but I had to be satisfied with the fact

that it lay in the direction of the waterfall. But it was to Bela I

entrusted the flinging of the bag. I gave it to her when she left the

coach. I had explained to her long before just what a place she would

find herself in when she was set down at the foot of the lane; how she

was to make her way in the darkness till she came to where there were

no more trees, when she was to strike across to the stream, led by the

noise of the waterfall. I was very particular in my directions, because I

knew the danger she incurred of slipping into the chasm. It was her fear

of this and the more than ordinary darkness, I presume, which made her

throw the bag hap-hazard. I simply wanted it dropped on the bank above

the waterfall."

"I saw the girl," Mr. Harper broke in. "She wore a black skirt like the

one you now wear, a black blouse and a red-checked handkerchief knotted

about her throat. But the young woman who was seen leaving these parts

the next morning had on some kind of a red dress and wore a hat. Bela had

thrown away her hat; it was picked up where the coach stopped and

afterwards brought here."

"I know. My plans went deep; I foresaw the possibility of her being

recognized by her clothes. To guard against this, I had her skirt and

blouse made double, the one side black, the other a bright color. She had

simply to turn them. The extra hat she carried with her; it was small and

easily concealed. Her neckerchief she probably tucked away. I had its

mate in my pocket, and when I left my room by the window, as I did the

moment after I had locked the two rooms, it was with my hair pulled down

and this neckerchief about my shoulders. How did I dare the risk! I

wonder now; but it was life, life I was after; life and love; nothing

else would have made me so fearless; nothing else would have given me

such confidence in myself or lent such speed to my feet, running as I did

in the darkness."

"You ran around the house to the lane, and entered it by the turn-stile."

"Yes, and so quickly that I had time to splash myself with mud and lose

all my natural characteristics before any one came to find me. It was

Anitra they met, panting and disheveled, at the head of the lane; Anitra

in appearance, Anitra in heart. I did not act a part; I _was_ Anitra;

Anitra as I had conceived her. To me she was and is an active, living

personality. Whenever I faced you in her character, I thought with her

half-educated mind; felt with her half-disciplined heart. I even shut my

ears to sounds; I would not hear; half the time I did not. Nor did I fall

back into my old ways when I was alone. From the minute Georgian closed

her door upon you for the last time, and I darkened my skin in

preparation for a permanent assumption of Anitra's individuality, I

became the imaginary twin, in thought, feeling, and action. It was my

only safeguard. Alas! had I only gone one step further and made myself

really deaf!"

The cry was bitterness itself, but it passed unheeded. Mr. Ransom could

not speak and Hazen had other cares in mind.

"Where is this woman Bela now?" he asked.

Georgian was too absorbed or too unwilling, to answer.

He repeated the question, this time with an authority she could not

resist. Rising slowly, she faced him for one impressive moment.

"My God!" came from her lips in startled surprise. "How pale you are! Sit

down or you will fall."

He shook his head impatiently.

"It's nothing. Answer my question. Where is this Bela now?"

"I don't know. She is beyond my reach--and _yours_. I told her to lose

herself. I think she is clever enough to do so. The money I paid her was

worth a few years spent in obscurity."

The spark lighting his eye brightened into baleful flame, but she met

it calmly. An indomitable spirit confronted one equally indomitable, and

his was the first to succumb. Turning from her, Hazen took out pencil

and paper from his pocket, and, crossing to the window with that same

peculiar and oscillating motion of which he seemed unconscious, or which

he found it impossible to subdue, he wrote a line, folded it, and before

even Harper was aware of his purpose threw up the sash and flung it out,

uttering a quick, sharp whistle as he did so.

"What's that you're up to?" shouted the lawyer, rushing to the window and

peering over the other's shoulder into the open space below, from which a

man was just disappearing.

"Am I a prisoner of the police that you should ask me that?" returned

Hazen, haughtily.

"No, but you should be," retorted Harper. "I don't like your ways, Hazen.

I don't like what you and your sister have said about the Cause and the

conscienceless obedience exacted from its members. I don't like any of

it; least of all this passing over of poor Bela's name to one whose duty

it will possibly be to make trouble for her."

Hazen smiled and moved from the window. No one there had ever seen such a

smile before, and the oppression which it brought heightened Georgian's

fear to terror.

"Let be!" she cried, lifting her hands towards Harper in inconceivable

anxiety. "A quarrel with him will not help you and it may greatly injure

_me_. Alfred, what am I to expect? Something dreadful, I can see. Your

face is not the face of one who forgives, or who sees in a gift of money

an adequate recompense for a cowardly withdrawal."

"You read rightly," said he. "Your fortune will be accepted by the Chief,

but he will never forget the cowardice. What faith can he put in one who

prefers her own happiness to the general good? You must prepare for

punishment."

"Punishment!" broke scornfully from Harper's lips.

She hushed him with a look before which even he stood aghast.

"You will only waste words," she cried. "If he says punishment, I may

expect punishment." And turning back to Ransom, in a burst of longing and

passion, she raised her eyes to him again, saying, "You do not forgive

because you do not realize my danger. But you will realize it when I am

gone."

Ransom, under a sudden releasement of the tension of doubt and awe which

had hitherto held him speechless, gave her one wild stare, then caught

her to his breast.

She uttered a happy sigh.

"Ah!" she murmured in the soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the

moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies

of this awful week."

"And I you," was the whispered answer. "Too deeply," he impetuously added

in louder tones, "to let any harm come to you now."

She smiled; but desperation fought with love in that smile. Gently

releasing herself, she cast another glance at Hazen, upon whose gray

and distorted countenance there had settled a great gloom, and

passionately exclaimed:

"Had law or love been able to interfere with the judgment of our Chief, I

should not have been driven into the herculean task of deceiving you and

the whole world as to my real identity." Then with slowly drooping head,

and the manner of one who has heard his doom pronounced, she hoarsely

whispered; "The death-mark was scrawled upon my door last night. This is

never done without the consent of the Chief. No one can save me now, not

even my own brother."

"False. I scrawled those lines," declared Ransom. "It was a test--"

"Which _I_ commanded you to make," put in Hazen. Then in fainter and less

strenuous tones, "She's right. Georgian Ransom is doomed; no one can save

her."

"False again!" This time it was Harper who interposed. "I can and will.

You forget that I know the name of your Chief. Conspiracy such as you

hint at is indictable in this country. I am a lawyer. I shall protect,

not only your sister, but her money."

The smile he received in return evinced no ordinary scorn.

"Try it," said he. Then with a laugh so low as to be almost inaudible,

yet so full of meaning that even Harper's cheek lost color, he calmly

declared: "No one knows the name of our Chief. Auchincloss is a member

and a valuable one--the only one whose name Georgian positively knows;

but he's but a unit in a thousand. You cannot reach the Head or even the

Heart of this great organization through him, and if you did and punished

it, the Cause would grow another head and you would be as far from

injuring us as you are now. Georgian is right. Not even I can save her

now." Then, with a steady look into each of their faces, he smiled again

and one and all shuddered. "But the Cause will go on," he cried in tones

ringing with enthusiasm. "Mankind will drop its shackles and we, we shall

have unriveted one of its chains. It is worth dying for, I, Alfred Hazen,

say it."

Slowly he sank back into his chair. The pallor which had astounded all

from the first had now become the ghastly mask of a soul whose only token

of life glimmered through the orbits of his fast glazing eyes. He

breathed, but in great pants. Georgian became alarmed.

"What is it?" she cried, forgetting her own fears and threats in the

horror which his appearance excited. "This is something more than

exhaustion from the pounding of that murderous eddy. What have you done?

Tell me, Alfred, tell me."

For the first time since his entrance into the room a suggestion of

sweetness crept into his tone.

"Simply forestalled the verdict of the Chief," said he. "I was under oath

to leave the country to-day on no ordinary errand. I failed to keep my

word, believing that the interests of the Cause could be better served by

what I have here undertaken than by the fulfilment of my primal duty. But

we are not allowed the free exercise of our own judgment, else what man

could be depended on? With us, neglect means death, no matter what the

excuse or the Cause's benefit. I knew this when I made my choice last

night. I have been dying ever since, but only actually since I came into

this room. When the doctors decided that I had received no mortal hurt in

the eddy, I--"

"Alfred!" The sister-heart spoke at last. "Not--not poison!"

"That is what you may call it here," said he, with a return to his old

imperious manner, "but later and to the world it will be kindness on your

part to name it exhaustion--the effect of my battle with the water. The

doctors will reconsider their diagnosis and blame my poor heart. You will

have no trouble about it. It _is_ my heart--I feel it failing--failing--"

He was sinking, but suddenly his whole nature flared up. Bounding to his

feet, he stood before them, with eyes aflame and a passionate strength in

his attitude which held them spellbound.

"What can law, what can selfish greed, what can self-aggrandizement and

the most pitiless ambition effect against men who own to such discipline

as this? Nothing. The world will go on, you will try your little ways,

your petty reforms, your slow-moving legislation and promise of justice

to the weak, but the invincible is the ready; ready to act; ready to

suffer, ready to die so that God is justified of his children and man

lifted into brotherhood and equality. You cannot strive against the

unseen and the fearless. The Cause will triumph though all else fails.

Georgian, I am sorry--" He was tottering now, but he held them back

with a stern gesture, "I don't think I ever knew just what love was.

There is one way--only one--"

But from those lips the explanation of this one way never came. As they

saw the change in him and rushed to his support, his head fell forward on

his breast and all was over.

CHAPTER XXX

NOT YET

They had laid him on the bed and Mr. Harper, in his usual practical way,

was hastening to rouse the house, when Georgian stepped before him and

laid her hand upon the door.

"Not yet," said she with authority. "He said there was a way--let us find

it before we give up our secret and our possible safety. Mr. Harper, have

you guessed that way?"

"No, except the usual one of protection through the law which he scouts.

I do not believe, Mrs. Ransom, in any other being necessary. Your

brother's threats answered a very good purpose while he was alive, but

now that he is dead they need not trouble you. I'm not even sure that I

believe in the organization. It was mostly in your brother's brain, Mrs.

Ransom; there's no such band, or if there is, its powers are not so

unlimited as he would make you believe."

She simply pointed to the motionless form and the distorted face which

were slowly assuming an expression of great majesty.

"There is my answer," said she. "Men of his strong attributes do not kill

themselves from fancy. He knew what he did."

"And you think--"

"That I will not live a week if I pass that door under the name of

Georgian Ransom. Mr. Harper, I am sure of it; Roger, I beg you to believe

what I say. It may not come here--but it will come. The mark has been set

against my name. Death only will obliterate this mark. But the name--that

is already a dead one--shall it not stay so?--It is the one way--the way

he meant."

"Georgian!"

It was a cry of infinite protest. Such a cry as one might expect from the

long-suffering Ransom. It drew her from the door; it brought her to his

side. As their eyes and hands met, Harper stepped back to the bedside,

and remembering the sensitiveness of the man before him, softly covered

his poor face. When he turned back, Mrs. Ransom was slowly shaking her

head under her husband's prolonged look and saying softly:

"No, not Georgian, Anitra. Henceforth Anitra, always Anitra. Can you

endure the ordeal for the sake of the safety and peace of mind it will

bring?"

"I endure it! Can you? Remember the deafness that marks Anitra."

"That can be cured." Her smile turned almost arch. "We will travel; there

are great physicians abroad."

"A sister--not a wife?"

"Your wife in time--Ah, it will mean a new courtship and--Anitra is a

different woman from Georgian--she has suffered--you will love her

better."

"O God! Harper, are we living, awake, sane? Help me at this crisis. I do

not know where I am or what this is she really asks."

"She asks the impossible. She asks what you can, perhaps, give, but not

what I can. You forget that this deception calls for connivance on my

part, and whatever you may think of me or my profession, deception is

foreign to my nature and very repugnant to me."

"And you refuse?"

"Mrs. Ransom, I must."

The hope which had held her up, the life which had returned to body and

spirit since this prospect of a possible future had dawned upon her,

faded from glance and smile.

"Then good-by, Roger, we shall never have those happy days together of

which we have often dreamt. I may stay with you a week, a month, a year,

but the horror of a great fear will be over us, and never, never can we

know joy."

She threw herself into her husband's arms; she clung to him.

"One moment," she cried, "one moment of perfect happiness before the

shadow falls. Oh, how I must love you, Roger, to say such words, to think

such thoughts, with the body of the brother I loved so deeply once, lying

there dead before us, killed by his own hand."

Ransom softly drew her aside where her eyes could not fall upon the bed.

Harper stopped still where he was, the picture of gloom and uncertainty.

"It must be settled now," said Ransom. "As we leave this room, our

relations must remain."

"I cannot but think your fears all folly," muttered Harper. "Yet the

responsibility you force upon me is terrible. If it were not for that

will! How can I present it to the Surrogate when I know the testator is

still alive?"

"You need not. I will do that," said Ransom.

"And the property! Given to a man we none of us know. Property that is

not legally his."

"I will make it so," cried Georgian with a burst of new and

uncontrollable hope as she saw, as she thought, this conscientious lawyer

yielding. "There is paper here; draw up a deed of gift. I will sign it

and you shall hold it so that whether I live or die, Auchincloss' title

to his money shall be absolute. Thus much I wish to do, that Alfred's

life should not have been sacrificed for nothing."

"Let me think."

Harper was wavering.

* * * * *

A half-hour later the door of Ransom's room was flung hurriedly open, and

loud cries for Mrs. Deo and the office clerk rang through the house. And

when they and others came running at the call, it was to find Mr. Ransom

and the lawyer hanging over the recumbent figure of the dead Hazen, and

the deaf girl Anitra pointing at the group, with wild and inarticulate

cries.

THE END

* * * * *

_Works by Anna Katharine Green_

THE LEAVENWORTH CASE. A Lawyer's Story.

"She has worked up a _cause celebre_ with a fertility of device and

ingenuity of treatment hardly second to Wilkie Collins or Edgar

Allan Poe."--_Christian Union_.

A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE

"A most ingenious and absorbingly interesting story. The

readers are held spellbound until the last page."--_Cincinnati

Commercial_.

THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES. A Story of New York Life.

"'The Sword of Damocles' is a book of great power, which far

surpasses either of its predecessors from her pen, and places her

high among American writers. The plot is complicated and is

managed adroitly.... In the delineation of characters she has

shown both delicacy and vigor."--_Congregationalist_.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

" ... She has never succeeded better in baffling the reader."--_Boston

Christian Register_.

HARD AND RING

"It is a tribute to the author's genius that she never tires and

never loses her readers.... It moves on clean and healthy....

It is worked out powerfully and skilfully."--_N. Y. Independent_.

THE MILL MYSTERY

X. Y. Z. and 7 TO 12: DETECTIVE STORIES

"Well written and extremely exciting and captivating.... She

is a perfect genius in the construction of a plot."--_N. Y. Commercial

Advertiser_.

THE OLD STONE HOUSE, AND OTHER STORIES

"It is a bundle of quite cleverly constructed pieces of fiction, with

which an idle hour may be pleasantly passed."--_N. Y. Independent_.

CYNTHIA WAKEHAM'S MONEY

"'Cynthia Wakeham's Money' is a story notable even among the

many vigorous works of Anna Katharine Green."--_New York Sun_.

MARKED "PERSONAL."

"The ingenious plot is built up with all the skill of the writer of

'The Leavenworth Case' to the very last chapter, which contains

the surprising solutions of several mysteries."

MISS HURD: AN ENIGMA

"A strong and interesting novel in an entirely new field of romance."

THE DOCTOR, HIS WIFE, AND THE CLOCK

"The story is entertainingly told...."--_Cincinnati Tribune_.

DR. IZARD

"Those who have read her other books will not need to be urged

to read this; they will be eager to do so, and we assure them a very

interesting story."--_Boston Times_.

THAT AFFAIR NEXT DOOR

"Startling in its ingenuity and its wonderful plot."--_Buffalo

Enquirer_.

LOST MAN'S LANE

AGATHA WEBB

ONE OF MY SONS

THE DEFENCE OF THE BRIDE, AND OTHER POEMS

RISIFI'S DAUGHTER

THE FILIGREE BALL

THE MILLIONAIRE BABY

THE AMETHYST BOX

THE HOUSE IN THE MIST

THE WOMAN IN THE ALCOVE