liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss Rosemary!"
She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.
"Some of our liberty?" he queried. "Did Miss Roselle send for me?"
"No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining room. . . . We've tended you and"
"Well," he demanded impatiently, "what do you want; whom shall I shoot?"
"You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've got to go back. You get yourself right along down!"
With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of fire in the hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but through an opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.
Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table that bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with
