*
24 THE BATTALION.
Pale as death, Annie took up the
candlestick and began to move with
unwilling feet, like a person under a
spell, down the stairway.
Miriam followed her. “You shall not
meet him alone,” she said. “I am
going with you, if it kills me.”
“You think he has come back from
the dead,” said the wife, with a bitter
laugh, which had a horrible sound in
the stillness. “Did you not hea.r him
tell me that he was not dead? You
do not see what the wretch has done.”
“But,” stammered Miriam, “you saw
him yourself—out there in the mud—
horribly dead—and they buried him.”
“Come,” said Annie, with a tense
vibration in her voice, that spoke a
will as of steel. “Come, you will soon
know what he is.”
She turned into the pantry at the
foot of the stairs, caught up a hatchet
that lay there with some kindling
wood, and then walked deliberately
down the hall, and with a steady hand
opened the front door, at which the
evil visitor stood.
Her eyes shone with a flame of
righteous rage. She had done some
swift thinking before she reached that
door. She had not only had a vivid
vision of the past, and in the twink
ling of an eye fathomed to its foul
depths the soul of the man she had
once loved, but she had formed her
resolution for the cirsis to which she
had come. She was no longer the
soft, responsive creature he had left
in the hour of his doom.
Now that he saw her, he recoiled
before the expression of her face.
“If,” said she, “you are Stephen
Gastreet, you do not come into this'
house alive. If you are Stephen
Gastreet, tell me who was the man
you murdered and forged your identi
ty upon, so coolly and carefully that
even your wife was deceived?”
In that passage from her room to the
door she had divined it all. It had
come like a flash into her mind—the
frightful vision of the cold blooded
murder and substitution, the storm
that helped to deaden the sound of the
pistol shots, the flight under the name
of the victim.
And who was that victim? “No,”
continued Annie, “you dare not call
yourself Stephen Gastreet; he is dead.
You must be Malcolm Tarnish.”
The name—from her lips— struck
the wretch like a blow. But he put
a force upon himself, and tried to
brave it out.
“And what if I did borrow Tar
nish’s name to come back to Bruns
wick and see you? He had robbed me
of all—honor, home, wife, the right
to exist.”
At a sign from her friend, Miriam
slipped out of the hall, unobserved
by the returned miscreant, as she had
fallen back into the shadow at the be
ginning of the conference.
“You must indeed be a hardened vil
lain,” said Annie, “to dare come here
over the very spot where you crushed
poor Tarnish into the mire. And what
did you come here for? To destroy
my happiness once more? To shame
me before the world as a woman with
two living husbands?”
“Annie! Annie! you are talking to
a desperate man,” cried Gastreet.
But, as he rushed toward her, she
put out the light and shut the door in
his face, locking and bolting it with
nervous energy and swiftness of move
ment. At the same time, the bell be
gan to ring, and he heard Miriam from
the window above crying with all her