Before the house rose two stately pine trees, and all about small firs and hemlocks. The garden path struggled up to the porch between wild flowers and weeds, and looming against its ancient bulk the shadows of out-houses and barns.

It stood among the hills, and just below around a curve in the road, lay the placid grey reservoir.

Sometimes parties would cross the fields, walking slowly toward the mountains. And sometimes children could be heard murmuring in the underbrush of things they scarcely knew.

Strange things had happened in this country town. Murder, theft, and little girls found weeping, and silent morose boys scowling along in the ragweed, with half-shut sunburned eyelids.

The place was wild, deserted and impossible in Winter. In Summer it was over-run with artists and town folk with wives and babies. Every Saturday there were fairs on the green, where second-hand articles were sold for a song, and flirting was formidable and passing. There were picnics, mountain climbings, speeches in the townhall, on the mark of the beast, on sin, and democracy, and once in a while a lecture on something that “everyone should know,” attended by mothers, their offspring left with servants who knew what everyone shouldn’t.

Then there were movies, bare legs, deacons, misses in cascades of curls and on Sunday one could listen to Mr. Widdie, the clergyman, who suffered from consumption, speak on love of one’s neighbour.

In this house and in this town had lived, for some fifteen years or so, Emma Gonsberg.

She was a little creature, lively, smiling, extremely good-natured. She had been married twice, divorced once, and was now a widow still in her thirties.

Of her two husbands she seldom said anything. Once she made the remark: “Only fancy, they never did catch on to me at all.”

She tried to be fashionable, did her hair in the Venetian style, wore gowns after the manner of Lady de Bath entering her carriage; and tried to cultivate only those who could tell her “where she stood.”

Her son Oscar was fourteen or thereabouts. He wore distinctly over-decorative English clothes, and remembered two words of some obscure Indian dialect that seemed to mean “fleas,” for whenever he flung these words defiantly at visitors they would go off into peals of laughter, headed by his mother. At such times he would lower his eyes and show a row of too heavy teeth.

Emma Gonsberg loved flowers, but could not grow them. She admired cats because there was “nothing servile about them,” but they would not stay with her; and though she loved horses and longed to be one of those daring women who could handle them “without being crushed in the stalls,” they nevertheless ignored her with calm indifference. Of her loves, passions and efforts, she had managed to raise a few ill-smelling pheasants, and had to let it go at that.

In the Winter she led a lonely and discriminating life. In the Summer her house filled with mixed characters, as one might say. A hot melancholy Jew, an officer who was always upon the point of depreciating his medals in a conceited voice, and one other who swore inoffensively.

Finally she had given this sort of thing up, partly because she had managed, soon after, to get herself entangled with a man called Ulric Straussmann. A tall rough fellow, who said he came from the Tyrol; a fellow without sensibilities but with a certain bitter sensuality. A good-natured creature as far as he went, with vivid streaks of German lust, which had at once something sentimental and something careless about it; the type who can turn the country, with a single gesture, into a brothel, and makes of children strong enemies. He showed no little audacity in putting things into people’s minds that he would not do himself.

He smelled very strongly of horses, and was proud of it. He pretended a fondness for all that goes under hide or hair, but a collie bitch, known for her gentleness, snapped at him and bit him. He invariably carried a leather thong, braided at the base for a handle, and would stand for hours talking, with his legs apart, whirling this contrived whip, and, looking out of the corner of his eyes would pull his moustache, waiting to see which of the ladies would draw her feet in.

He talked in a rather even, slightly nasal tone, wetting his lips with a long outthrust of tongue, like an animal. His teeth were splendid and his tongue unusually red, and he prided himself on these and on the calves of his legs. They were large, muscular and rather handsome.

He liked to boast that there was nothing that he could not do and be forgiven, because, as he expressed it, “I have always left people satisfied.” If it were hate or if it were love, he seemed to have come off with unusual success. “Most people are puny,” he would add, “while I am large, strong, healthy. Solid flesh through and through,” whereat he would pound his chest and smile.

He was new to the town and sufficiently insolent to attract attention. There was also something childishly naÏve in him, as there is in all tall and robust men who talk about themselves. This probably saved him, because when he was drinking he often became gross and insulting, but he soon put the women of the party in a good humour by giving one of them a hearty and good-natured slap on the rear that she was not likely to forget.

Besides this man Emma had a few old friends of the less interesting, though better-read, type. Among them, however, was an exception, Oliver Kahn, a married man with several children one heard of and never saw. A strange, quiet man who was always talking. He had splendid eyes and a poor mouth—very full lips. In the beginning one surmised that he had been quite an adventurer. He had an odour about him of the rather recent cult of the “terribly good.” He seemed to have been unkind to his family in some way, and was spending the rest of his life in a passion of regret and remorse. He had become one of those guests who are only missed when absent. He finally stayed for good, sleeping in an ante-room with his boots on,—his one royal habit.

In the beginning Emma had liked him tremendously. He was at once gentle and furious, but of late, just prior to the Straussmann affair, he had begun to irritate her. She thought to herself, “He is going mad, that’s all.” She was angry at herself for saying “that’s all,” as if she had expected something different, more momentous.

He had enormous appetites, he ate like a Porthos and drank like a Pantagruel, and talked hour after hour about the same thing, “Love of one’s neighbour,” and spent his spare time in standing with his hands behind him, in front of the pheasants’ cage. He had been a snipe hunter in his time, and once went on a big game hunt, but now he said he saw something more significant here.

He had, like all good sportsmen, even shot himself through the hand, but of late he pretended that he did not remember what the scar came from.

He seemed to suffer a good deal. Evil went deep and good went deep and he suffered the tortures of the damned. He wept and laughed and ate and drank and slept, and year by year his eyes grew sweeter, tenderer, and his mouth fuller, more gross.

The child Oscar did not like Kahn, yet sometimes he would become extraordinarily excited, talk very fast, almost banteringly, a little malignly, and once when Kahn had taken his hand he drew it away angrily. “Don’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because it is dirty,” he retorted maliciously.

“As if you really knew of what I was thinking,” Kahn said, and put his own hands behind him.

Emma liked Kahn, was attached to him. He mentioned her faults without regret or reproval, and this in itself was a divine sort of love.

He would remark: “We cannot be just because we are bewildered; we ought to be proud enough to welcome our enemies as judges, but we hate, and to hate is the act of the incurious. I love with an everlasting but a changing love, because I know I am the wrong sort of man to be good—and because I revere the shadow on the threshold.”

“What shadow, Kahn?”

“In one man we called it Christ—it is energy; for most of us it is dead, a phantom. If you have it you are Christ, and if you have only a little of it you are but the promise of the Messiah.”

These seemed great words, and she looked at him with a little admiring smile.

“You make me uneasy for fear that I have not said ‘I love you with an everlasting love,’ often enough to make it an act of fanaticism.”

As for Oscar, he did what he liked, which gave him character, but made him difficult to live with.

He was not one of those “weedy” youths, long of leg, and stringy like “jerked beef, thank God!” as his mother said to visitors. He was rather too full-grown, thick of calf and hip and rather heavy of feature. His hands and feet were not out of proportion as is usually the case with children of his age, but they were too old looking.

He did not smoke surreptitiously. On the contrary he had taken out a pipe one day in front of his mother, and filling it, smoked in silence, not even with a frightened air, and for that matter not even with a particularly bold air;—he did it quite simply, as something he had finally decided to do, and Emma Gonsberg had gone off to Kahn with it, in a rather helpless manner.

Most children swing in circles about a room, clumsily. Oscar on the contrary walked into the four corners placidly and officially, looked at the backs of the books here and a picture there, and even grunted approvingly at one or two in quite a mature manner.

He had a sweetheart, and about her and his treatment of her there were only a few of the usual signs—he was shy, and passionately immersed in her, there was little of the casual smartness of first calf love about it, though he did in truth wave her off with a grin if he was questioned.

He took himself with seriousness amounting to a lack of humour—and though he himself knew that he was a youth, and had the earmarks of adolescence about him—and know it he certainly did—once he said, “Well, what of it—is that any reason why I should not be serious about everything?” This remark had so astonished his mother that she had immediately sent for Kahn to know if he thought the child was precocious—and Kahn had answered, “If he were, I should be better pleased.”

“But what is one to expect?”

“Children,” he answered, “are never what they are supposed to be, and they never have been. He may be old for his age, but what child hasn’t been?”

In the meantime, she tried to bring Straussmann and Kahn together—“My house is all at odds,” she thought, but these two never hit it off. Straussmann always appeared dreadfully superficial and cynical, and Kahn dull and good about nothing.

“They have both got abnormal appetites,” she thought wearily. She listened to them trying to talk together of an evening on the piazza steps. Kahn was saying:

“You must, however, warn yourself, in fact I might say arm yourself, against any sensation of pleasure in doing good; this is very difficult, I know, but it can be attained. You can give and forgive and tolerate gently and, as one might say, casually, until it’s a second nature.”

“There you have it, tolerate—who wants tolerance, or a second nature? Well, let us drop it. I feel like a child—it’s difficult not to feel like a child.”

“Like Oscar—he has transports—even at his age,” Emma added hesitatingly. “Perhaps that’s not quite as it should be?”

“The memory of growing up is worse than the fear of death,” Kahn remarked, and Emma sighed.

“I don’t know; the country was made for children, they say—I could tell you a story about that,” Straussmann broke off, whistling to Oscar. “Shall I tell Oscar about the country—and what it is really like?” he asked Emma, turning his head.

“Let the boy alone.”

“Why, over there in that small village,” Straussmann went on, taking Oscar by the arm. “It is a pretty tale I could tell you—perhaps I will when you are older—but don’t let your mother persuade you that the country is a nice, healthful, clean place, because, my child, it’s corrupt.”

“Will you let the boy alone!” Emma cried, turning very red.

“Ah, eh—I’ll let him alone right enough—but it won’t make much difference—you’ll see,” he went on. “There is a great deal told to children that they should not hear, I’ll admit, but there wasn’t a thing I didn’t know when I was ten. It happened one day in a hotel in Southampton—a dark place, gloomy, smelling frightfully of mildew, the walls were damp and stained. A strange place, eh, to learn the delights of love, but then our parents seldom dwell on the delights,—they are too taken up with the sordid details, the mere sordid details. My father had a great beard, and I remember thinking that it would have been better if he hadn’t said such things. I wasn’t much good afterwards for five or six years, but my sister was different. She enjoyed it immensely and forgot all about it almost immediately, excepting when I reminded her.”

“Go to bed, Oscar,” Emma said abruptly.

He went, and on going up the steps he did not let his fingers trail along the spindles of the banisters with his usual “Eeny meeny miny mo,” etc.

Emma was a little troubled and watched him going up silently, hardly moving his arms.

“Children should be treated very carefully, they should know as much as possible, but in a less superficial form than they must know later.”

“I think a child is born corrupt and attains to decency,” Straussmann said grinning.

“If you please,” Emma cried gaily, “we will talk about things we understand.”

Kahn smiled. “It’s beautiful, really beautiful,” he said, meaning her gaiety. He always said complimentary things about her lightness of spirit, and always in an angry voice.

“Come, come, you are going mad. What’s the good of that?” she said, abruptly, thinking, “He is a man who discovered himself once too often.”

“You are wrong, Emma, I am not worthy of madness.”

“Don’t be on your guard, Kahn,” she retorted.

Oscar appeared before her suddenly, barefoot. She stared at him. “What is it?” she at last managed to ask in a faint almost suffocated voice.

“I want to kiss you,” he whispered.

She moved toward him slowly, when, half way, he hurried toward her, seized her hand, kissed it, and went back into the house.

“My God,” she cried out. “He is beginning to think for himself,” and ran in after him.

She remembered how she had talked to him the night before, only the night before. “You must love with an everlasting but a changing love,” and he became restless. “With an everlasting but a changing love.”

“What do you mean by ‘changing’?” His palms were moist, and his feet twitched.

“A love that takes in every detail, every element—that can understand without hating, without distinction, I think.”

“Why do you say, ‘I think’?”

“I mean, I know,” she answered, confused.

“Get that Kahn out, he’s a rascal,” he said, abruptly, grinning.

“What are you saying, Oscar?” she demanded, turning cold. “I’ll never come to your bed again, take your hands and say ‘Our Father.’”

“It will be all right if you send that man packing,” he said, stressing the word “packing.”

She was very angry, and half started toward the door. Then she turned back. “Why do you say that, Oscar?”

“Because he makes you nervous—well, then—because he crouches”; he saw by his mother’s face that she was annoyed, puzzled, and he turned red to his ears. “I don’t mean that, I mean he isn’t good; he’s just watching for something good to happen, to take place——” His voice trailed off, and he raised his eyes solemn and full of tears to her face. She leaned down and kissed him, tucking him in like a “little boy.”

“But I’m not a little boy,” he called out to her.

And tonight she did not come down until she thought Kahn and Straussmann had gone.

Kahn had disappeared, but Straussmann had taken a turn or two about the place and was standing in the shadow of the stoop when she came out.

“Come,” he said. “What is it that you want?”

“I think it’s religion,” she answered abruptly. “But it’s probably love.”

“Let us take a walk,” he suggested.

They turned in toward the shadows of the great still mountains and the denser, more arrogant shadows of the out-houses and barns. She looked away into the silence, and the night, and a warm sensation as of pleasure or of something expected but intangible came over her, and she wanted to laugh, to cry, and thinking of it she knew that it was neither.

She was almost unconscious of him for a little, thinking of her son. She raised her long silk skirts about her ankles and tramped off into the dampness. A whippoorwill was whistling off to the right. It sounded as if he were on the fence, and Emma stopped and tried to make it out. She took Ulric’s arm presently, and feeling his muscles swell began to think of the Bible. “Those who take by the sword shall die by the sword. And those who live by the flesh shall die by the flesh.”

She wished that she had someone she could believe in. She saw a door before her mental eye, and herself opening it and saying, “Now tell me this, and what it means,—only today I was thinking ‘those who live by the flesh’”—and as suddenly the door was slammed in her face. She started back.

“You are nervous,” he said in a pleased whisper.

Heavy stagnant shadows sprawled in the path. “So many million leaves and twigs to make one dark shadow,” she said, and was sorry because it sounded childishly romantic, quite different from what she had intended, what she had meant.

They turned the corner of the carriage-house. Something moved, a toad, grey and ugly, bounced across her feet and into the darkness of the hedges. Coming to the entrance of the barn they paused. They could distinguish sleeping hens, the white films moving on their eyes—and through a window at the back, steam rising from the dung heap.

“There don’t seem to be any real farmers left,” she said aloud, thinking of some book she had read about the troubles of the peasants and landholders.

“You’re thinking of my country,” he said smiling.

“No, I wasn’t,” she said. “I was wondering what it is about the country that makes it seem so terrible?”

“It’s your being a Puritan—a tight-laced delightful little Puritan.”

She winced at the words, and decided to remain silent.

It was true, Straussmann was in a fever of excitement—he was always this way with women, especially with Emma. He tried to conceal it for the time being, thinking, rightly, that a display of it would not please her just at the moment—“but it would be only a matter of minutes when she would welcome it,” he promised himself, and waited.

He reflected that she would laugh at him. “But she would enjoy it just the same. The way with all women who have had anything to do with more than one man and are not yet forty,” he reflected. “They like what they get, but they laugh at you, and know you are lying——”

“Oh, my God!” Emma said suddenly, drawing her arm away and wiping her face with her handkerchief.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, it’s the heat.”

“It is warm,” he said dismally.

“I despise everything, I really despise everything, but you won’t believe—— I mean everything when I say everything—you’ll think I mean some one thing—won’t you?” she went on hurriedly. She felt that she was becoming hysterical.

“It doesn’t matter,” he rejoined, walking on beside her, his heart beating violently. “Down, you dog,” he said aloud.

“What is that?” She raised her eyes and he looked into them, and they both smiled.

“That’s better. I wish I were God.”

“A desire for a vocation.”

“Not true, and horrid, as usual,” she answered, and she was hot and angry all at once.

He pulled at his moustache and sniffed. “I can smell the hedges—ah, the country is a gay deceiver—it smells pleasant enough, but it’s treacherous. The country, my dear Emma, has done more to corrupt man, to drag him down, to turn him loose upon his lower instincts, than morphine, alcohol and women. That’s why I like it, that’s why it’s the perfect place for women. They are devils and should be driven out, and as there’s more room in the country and consequently less likelihood of driving them out in too much of a hurry, there is more time for amusement.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye as he said these things to note if they were ill advised. They seemed to leave her cold, but tense.

A little later they passed the barns again.

“What was that?” Emma asked suddenly.

“I heard nothing.”

But she had heard something, and her heart beat fearfully. She recognized Oscar’s voice. She reached up signing Straussmann to be quiet. She did not want him to hear; she wished that the ground would yawn, would swallow him up.

“See that yellow flower down there,” she said, pointing toward the end of the path they had just come. “I want it, I must have it, please.” He did as he was bid, amiably enough.

She listened—she heard the voice of Oscar’s little sweetheart:

“It seems as if we were one already.”... It was high, resolute, unflagging, without emotion, a childish parroting of some novel. Oscar’s voice came back, half smothered:

“Do you really care—more than you like Berkeley?”

“Yes, I do,” she answered in the same false treble, “lots more.”

“Come here,” he said softly—the hay rustled.

“I don’t want to—the rye gets into my hair and spoils it.”

“Dolly, do you like the country?”

“Yes, I do,”—without conviction.

“We will go to the city,” he answered.

“Oh, Oscar, you’re so strong,” she giggled, and it sent a cold shudder through Emma’s being.

Then presently, “What’s the matter, Oscar—why, you’re crying.”

“I’m not—well, then yes, I am—what of it?—you’ll understand, too, some day.”

She was evidently frightened, because she said in a somewhat loosened key, “No one would ever believe that we were as much in love as we are, would they, Oscar?”

“No, why do you ask that?”

“It’s a great pity,” she said again with the false sound, and sighed.

“Do you care? Why do you care?”

Straussmann was coming back with the yellow flower between thumb and forefinger. Emma ran a little way to meet him.

“Come, let us go home the other way.”

“Rather, let us not go home,” he said, boldly, and took her wrist, hurting her.

“Ah,” she said. “Vous m’avez blessÉe d’amour”—ironically.

“Yes, speak French, it helps women like you at such moments,” he said, brutally, and kissed her.

But kissing him back, she thought, “The fool, why does Oscar take her so seriously when they are both children, and she is torturing him.”

“My love, my sweet, my little love,” he was babbling.

She tried to quench this, trembling a little. “But tell me, my friend—no, not so hasty—what do you think of immortality?” He had pushed her so far back that there was no regaining her composure. “My God, in other words, what of the will to retribution!”

But she could not go on. “I’ve tried to,” she thought.

Later, when the dawn was almost upon them, he said: “How sad to be drunk, only to die. For the end of all man is Fate, in other words, the end of all man is vulgar.”

She felt the need of something that had not been.

“I’m not God, you see, after all.”

“So I see, madam,” he said. “But you’re a damned clever little woman.”

When she came in, she found Kahn lying flat on his back, his eyes wide open.

“Couldn’t you sleep?”

“No, I could not sleep.”

She was angry. “I’m sorry—you suffer.”

“Yes, a little.”

“Kahn,” she cried in anguish, flinging herself on her knees beside him. “What should I have done, what shall I do?”

He put his hand on her cheek. “My dear, my dear,” he said, and sighed. “I perhaps was wrong.”

She listened.

“Very wrong, I see it all now; I am an evil man, an old and an evil being.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, yes,” he said gently, softly, contradicting her. “Yes, evil, and pitiful, and weak”; he seemed to be trying to remember something. “What is it that I have overlooked?” He asked the question in such a confused voice that she was startled.

“Is it hate?” she asked.

“I guess so, yes, I guess that’s it.”

“Kahn, try to think—there must be something else.”

“Madness.”

She began to shiver.

“Are you cold?”

“No, it’s not cold.”

“No, it’s not cold,” he repeated after her. “You are not cold, Emma, you are a child.”

Tears began to roll down her cheeks.

“Yes,” he continued sadly. “You too will hear: remorse is the medium through which the evil spirit takes possession.”

And again he cried out in anguish. “But I’m not superficial—I may have been wanton, but I’ve not been superficial. I wanted to give up everything, to abandon myself to whatever IT demanded, to do whatever IT directed and willed. But the terrible thing is I don’t know what abandon is. I don’t know when it’s abandon and when it’s just a case of minor calculation.

“The real abandon is not to know whether one throws oneself off a cliff or not, and not to care. But I can’t do it, because I must know, because I’m afraid if I did cast myself off, I should find that I had thrown myself off the lesser thing after all, and that,” he said in a horrified voice, “I could never outlive, I could never have faith again. And so it is that I shall never know, Emma; only children and the naÏve know, and I am too sophisticated to accomplish the divine descent.”

“But you must tell me,” she said, hurriedly. “What am I to do, what am I to think? My whole future depends on that, on your answer—on knowing whether I do an injustice not to hate, not to strike, not to kill—well, you must tell me—I swear it is my life—my entire life.”

“Don’t ask me, I can’t know, I can’t tell. I who could not lead one small sheep, what could I do with a soul, and what still more could I do with you? No,” he continued, “I’m so incapable. I am so mystified. Death would be a release, but it wouldn’t settle anything. It never settles anything, it simply wipes the slate, it’s merely a way of putting the sum out of mind, yet I wish I might die. How do I know now but that everything I have thought, and said, and done, has not been false, a little abyss from which I shall crawl laughing at the evil of my own limitation.”

“But the child—what have I been telling Oscar—to love with an everlasting love——”

“That’s true,” he said.

“Kahn, listen. What have I done to him, what have I done to myself? What are we all doing here—are we all mad—or are we merely excited—overwrought, hysterical? I must know, I must know.” She took his hand and he felt her tears upon it.

“Kahn, is it an everlasting but a changing love—what kind of love is that?”

“Perhaps that’s it,” he cried, jumping up, and with a gesture tore his shirt open at the throat. “Look, I want you to see, I run upon the world with a bared breast—but never find the blade—ah, the civility of our own damnation—that’s the horror. A few years ago, surely this could not have happened. Do you know,” he said, turning his eyes all hot and burning upon her, “the most terrible thing in the world is to bare the breast and never to feel the blade enter!” He buried his face in his hands.

“But, Kahn, you must think, you must give me an answer. All this indecision is all very well for us, for all of us who are too old to change, for all of us who can reach God through some plaything we have used as a symbol, but there’s my son, what is he to think, to feel, he has no jester’s stick to shake, nor stool to stand on. Am I responsible for him? Why,” she cried frantically, “must I be responsible for him? I tell you I won’t be, I can’t. I won’t take it upon myself. But I have, I have. Is there something that can make me immune to my own blood? Tell me—I must wipe the slate—the fingers are driving me mad—can’t he stand alone now? Oh, Kahn, Kahn!” she cried, kissing his hands. “See, I kiss your hands, I am doing so much. You must be the prophet—you can’t do less for the sign I give you—I must know, I must receive an answer, I will receive it.”

He shook her off suddenly, a look of fear came into his eyes.

“Are you trying to frighten me?” he whispered. She went into the hall, into the dark, and did not know why, or understand anything. Her mind was on fire, and it was consuming things that were strange and merciful and precious.

Finally she went into her son’s room and stood before his bed. He lay with one feverish cheek against a dirty hand, his knees drawn up; his mouth had a peculiar look of surprise about it.

She bent down, called to him, not knowing what she was doing. “Wrong, wrong,” she whispered, and she shook him by the shoulders. “Listen, Oscar, get up. Listen to me!”

He awoke and cried out as one of her tears, forgotten, cold, struck against his cheek. An ague shook his limbs. She brought her face close to his.

“Son, hate too, that is inevitable—irrevocable——”

He put out his two hands and pushed them against her breast and in a subdued voice said, “Go away, go away,” and he looked as if he were about to cry, but he did not cry.

She turned and fled into the hall.

However, in the morning, at breakfast, there was nothing unusual about her, but a tired softness and yielding of spirit; and at dinner, which was always late, she felt only a weary indifference when she saw Straussmann coming up the walk. He had a red and white handkerchief about his throat, and she thought, “How comic he looks.”

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” she answered, and a touch of her old gaiety came into her voice. Kahn was already seated, and now she motioned Straussmann to follow. She began slicing the cold potted beef and asked them about sugar in their tea, adding, “Oscar will be here soon.” To Kahn she showed only a very little trace of coldness, of indecision.

“No,” Straussmann said, still standing, legs apart: “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like a word or two with Kahn.” They stepped off the porch together.

“Kahn,” he said, going directly to the point, “listen,” he took hold of Kahn’s coat by the lapel. “You have known Emma longer than I have, you’ve got to break it to her.” He flourished a large key under Kahn’s nose, as he spoke.

“I’ve got him locked up in the out-house safe enough for the present, but we must do something immediately.”

“What’s the matter?” A strange, pleasant but cold sweat broke out upon Kahn’s forehead.

“I found Oscar sitting beside the body of his sweetheart, what’s-her-name; he had cut her throat with a kitchen knife, yes, with a kitchen knife—he seemed calm, but he would say nothing. What shall we do?”

“They’ll say he was a degenerate from the start——”

“Those who live by the flesh—eh?”

“No,” Kahn said, in a confused voice, “that’s not it.”

They stood and stared at each other so long that presently Emma grew nervous and came down the garden path to hear what it was all about.