The return seemed interminable--though he never shifted his position.

Yet when he drew up at his own door and looked at his watch he found he had been absent only half an hour.

Only half an hour! As he entered the house he turned with the same abstraction towards a mirror in the hall, as if he expected to see some outward and visible change in himself in that time.

Dismissing his servants to bed, he went into his dressing-room, completely changed his attire, put on a pair of long riding-boots, and throwing a serape over his shoulders, paused a moment, took a pair of small "Derringer" pistols from a box, put them in his pockets, and then slipped cautiously down the staircase.

A lack of confidence in his own domestics had invaded him for the first time.