CLARENCE. 91

for their first victim; who retained a terrible consciousness of the appearance of the dead man; he had no such feeling; he had only a grim contentment in the wiped-out inefii- cient life, and contempt for the limp and helpless body. He suddenly recalled his callousness as a boy when face to face with the victims of the Indian massacre, his sense of fastidious superciliousness in the discovery of the body of Susy's mother !— surely it was the cold blood of his father in- fluencing him ever thus. YYhat had he to do with affection, with domestic happiness, with the ordinary ambitions of man's life —whose blood was frozen at its source! Yet even with this very thought came once more the old inconsistent tenderness he had as a boy lavished upon the almost unknown and fugitive father who had forsaken his childish companionship, and remembered him only by secret gifts. He remembered how he had worshiped him even while the pious padres at San José were endeavor- ing to eliminate this terrible poison from his blood and combat his hereditary instinct in his conflicts with his school-fellows. And it was a. part of this inconsistency that, riding away from the scene of his first bloodshed,