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Meantime the voice and muffled tapping had brought the tremulous fingers of old Forsyth to the door-latch. He opened the door partly; a slight figure that had been lurking in the shadow of the porch pushed rapidly through the opening. There was a faint outcry quickly hushed, and the door closed again. The rays of a single candle showed the two old people hysterically clasping in their arms the figure that had entered–a slight but vicious-looking young fellow of five-and-twenty.

“There, d–n it!” he said impatiently, in a voice whose rich depth was like Josephine’s, but whose querulous action was that of the two old people before him, “let me go, and quit that, I didn’t come here to be strangled! I want some money–money, you hear! Devilish quick, too, for I’ve got to be off again before daylight. So look sharp, will you?”

“But, Stevy dear, when you didn’t come that time three months ago, but wrote from Los Angeles, you said you’d made a strike at last, and”–

“What are you talking about?” he interrupted violently. “That was just my lyin’ to keep you from worryin’ me. Three months ago–three months ago! Why, you must have been crazy to have swallowed it; I hadn’t a cent.”

“Nor have we,” said the old woman, shrilly. “That hellish sister of yours still keeps us like beggars. Our only hope was you, our own boy. And now you only come to–to go again.”

“But SHE has money; SHE’S doing well, and SHE shall give it to me,” he went on, angrily. “She can’t bully me with her business airs and morality. Who else has got a right to share, if it is not her own brother?”

Alas for the fatuousness of human malevolence! Had the unhappy couple related only the simple facts they knew about the new guest of Burnt Ridge Ranch, and the manner of his introduction, they might have spared what followed.

But the old woman broke into a vindictive cry: “Who else, Steve–who else? Why, the slut has brought a MAN here–a sneaking, deceitful, underhanded, crazy lover!”

“Oh, has she?” said the young man, fiercely, yet secretly pleased at this promising evidence of his sister’s human weakness. “Where is she? I’ll go to her. She’s in her room, I suppose,” and before they could restrain him, he had thrown off their impeding embraces and darted across the hall.

The two old people stared doubtfully at each other. For even this powerful ally, whose strength, however, they were by no means sure of, might succumb before the determined Josephine! Prudence demanded a middle course. “Ain’t they brother and sister?” said the old man, with an air of virtuous toleration. “Let ’em fight it out.”

The young man impatiently entered the room he remembered to have been his sister’s. By the light of the moon that streamed upon the window he could see she was not there. He passed hurriedly to the door of her bedroom; it was open; the room was empty, the bed unturned. She was not in the house–she had gone to the mill. Ah! What was that they had said? An infamous thought passed through the scoundrel’s mind. Then, in what he half believed was an access of virtuous fury, he began by the dim light to rummage in the drawers of the desk for such loose coin or valuables as, in the perfect security of the ranch, were often left unguarded. Suddenly he heard a heavy footstep on the threshold, and turned.

An awful vision–a recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that weird light that he thought he was losing his senses–stood before him. It moved forwards with staring eyeballs and white and open lips from which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no living man! With a single desperate, almost superhuman effort Stephen Forsyth bounded aside, leaped from the window, and ran like a madman from the house. Then the apparition trembled, collapsed, and sank in an undistinguishable heap to the ground.