ing eagerly. She leaned into the hall, unable for a moment to grasp what was going forward.
"It's Mr. Findlay come back, begging us to hide him," Alma said.
"Hush!" Findlay commanded harshly.
"Oh, Dale, Dale! are you here again?" Mrs. Nearing hastened forward, confronting him without a tremor. "After all the sorrow and trouble you've brought on this house, do you dare come back to it again?"
"I just want to stay here till night, then I'll go. I promise you I'll never come back."
"Till night—stay till night? You—after you—you murderer!"
"Hide me!" he ordered, roughly, desperate now over the delay. "They may come any minute! Put me in Nearing's room—they'll not search it. Hurry, I tell you—take me to Nearing's room!"
"No!" Mrs. Nearing answered him, coldly, placing herself before him as if to dispute his passage along the hall. "There's no place where you can hide in this house. The long-suffering walls themselves would shout murder."
Findlay was at far greater disadvantage in the presence of these two women, who scorned and despised him, and seemed to fear him not at all, than he would have been if confronted by three armed men. He hesitated, in spite of his desperate need, not knowing which foot to advance.
"I look like the big black devil now," he said bitterly, "but I've never done any more than Hal Nearing would have done, has done, many a time in his honorable
