“She won’t stand it,” he thought.  “She isn’t long for this world.  Maybe it is all for the best, poor lass.  But I wish that young Master had never set foot in the Connors orchard, or in this house.  Margaret, Margaret, it’s hard that your child should have to be paying the reckoning of a sin that was sinned before her birth.”

Kilmeny walked through the lane slowly and absently like a woman in a dream.  When she came to the gap in the fence where the lane ran into the orchard she lifted her wan, drooping face and saw Eric, sitting in the shadow of the wood at the other side of the orchard with his bowed head in his hands.  She stopped quickly and the blood rushed wildly over her face.

The next moment it ebbed, leaving her white as marble.  Horror filled her eyes,—­blank, deadly horror, as the livid shadow of a cloud might fill two blue pools.

Behind Eric Neil Gordon was standing tense, crouched, murderous.  Even at that distance Kilmeny saw the look on his face, saw what he held in his hand, and realized in one agonized flash of comprehension what it meant.

All this photographed itself in her brain in an instant.  She knew that by the time she could run across the orchard to warn Eric by a touch it would be too late.  Yet she must warn him—­she must—­she must!  A mighty surge of desire seemed to rise up within her and overwhelm her like a wave of the sea,—­a surge that swept everything before it in an irresistible flood.  As Neil Gordon swiftly and vindictively, with the face of a demon, lifted the axe he held in his hand, Kilmeny sprang forward through the gap.

“Eric, Eric, look behind you—­look behind you!”

Eric started up, confused, bewildered, as the voice came shrieking across the orchard.  He did not in the least realize that it was Kilmeny who had called to him, but he instinctively obeyed the command.

He wheeled around and saw Neil Gordon, who was looking, not at him, but past him at Kilmeny.  The Italian boy’s face was ashen and his eyes were filled with terror and incredulity, as if he had been checked in his murderous purpose by some supernatural interposition.  The axe, lying at his feet where he had dropped it in his unutterable consternation on hearing Kilmeny’s cry told the whole tale.  But before Eric could utter a word Neil turned, with a cry more like that of an animal than a human being, and fled like a hunted creature into the shadow of the spruce wood.

A moment later Kilmeny, her lovely face dewed with tears and sunned over with smiles, flung herself on Eric’s breast.

“Oh, Eric, I can speak,—­I can speak!  Oh, it is so wonderful!  Eric, I love you—­I love you!”

CHAPTER XVIII.  NEIL GORDON SOLVES HIS OWN PROBLEM

“It is a miracle!” said Thomas Gordon in an awed tone.