adopt when the mosquitoes outside made the veranda
impossible. Perhaps he understood the preoccupation which more
particularly looked out of Millie's eyes. He felt the burden of his debt
to these people, a debt he could never repay; he understood the feelings
which his return must inspire if the child, left in their care, had
become to them a tithe of that which he had become to him. He knew it
was his purpose to tear the child out of their lives. And the wrench
would be no less for the thought that he purposed carrying him off to
those regions of desolation which had already come very near to costing
the child's helpless little life.

So his steady eyes were watchful of the woman's attitude, and he looked
for the sign of those feelings which he knew his return must have set
stirring. He knew that, whatever the big Scotsman felt and thought, the
woman was the real factor with which he must reckon.

With this understanding he frankly laid bare much which he otherwise
would have kept deep hidden. He told these two, who listened in deep
sympathy, the story of his pursuit of the man who had wronged him, from
the beginning to the end. And, in the telling, so shorn of all
unnecessary colouring, the simple deliberateness of his purpose,
contemplated in the coldly passionate desire of an implacable nature,
the story gained a tremendous force, the more so that his pursuit had
ended in failure.

He told them how for nearly a year, after winding up the affairs of his
dead father, which had left him with even a better fortune than he had
expected, he had systematically devoted himself to spreading a wide net
of enquiries. In this process he had to travel some thousands of miles,
and had to write many hundreds of letters, and had spent countless hours
in the official bureau of local police.

He told them how finally he had discovered the trail he, sought in a
remote haunt in the poorer quarters of Winnipeg. This, after many
tortuous wanderings and blind alley searchings, had finally led him to
the waterside of Quebec, and the purlieus of Mallard's, where, under the
guidance of the celebrated Maurice Saney, he ran up against the blank
wall of that redoubtable harbour of crime.

"All this," he said, without emotion, "took me over two years. And I
guess it wasn't till I hit up against Mallard's that I sat down and took
a big think. You see," he went on simply, "I wanted to kill that feller.
I wanted to kill that feller, and take