ountains that divide India from
Central Asia; across the terrible Depsang Plains, seventeen thousand
feet up; and over four passes choked with snow; till they came upon a
deserted fort, set in the midst of stark space, and knew that here,
indeed, was the limit of human habitation. Next day the work of
exploration had begun in earnest. Week after week, with unwearying
persistence, they had pushed on, upward, always upward, through regions
sacred to the eagles and the clouds; working along streams that cut
their way through hillsides steep as houses, or along tracks that ran
to polished ledges of rock and dropped sheer to unimaginable depths;
clambering over formidable ranges by any chance opening that could be
dignified by the name of a pass; the eternally cheery Gurkhas solacing
themselves with rum; the Pathans with opium; the Scot with rare nips of
brandy, on the bitterest nights. Still more rarely,--at wider and
wider intervals of time,--he drew from his breast-pocket a pill-box,
like the one still locked in his writing-table drawer at home. Its
contents were running very low by now; and, once gone, they would never
again be replenished. That he knew; with a knowledge born not of
arrogance, but of faith that somehow, somewhen the right must prevail.

And to-night,--as he sat alone by the fire, watching the greyness of
death quench spark after spark of living light, while a late moon
sailed leisurely into view, overlaying the steely hardness of ice and
snow with a veil of shimmering silver,--he took out the box, and opened
it. He knew it held two pellets; no more. Why not take them at once,
and so break the last link of the devil's chain? He turned them into
his palm, . . and paused, while the enemy within whispered words of
seduction hard to be withstood. But now a second voice spoke in him
also: a voice of mingled authority and pleading. Why not fling away
both box and pellets, foregoing the final degradation, the final
rapture, that every nerve in him clamoured for more imperatively than
he dared admit even to himself.

For some reason the suggestion brought Desmond vividly to his
mind:--Desmond, with his characteristic assertion: "Of course you will
succeed. You have won His great talisman." Yes. He was right!--'the
great talisman.' Surely if marriage were worth anything, if it meant
more to a man than mere domesticity, and material satisfaction, it
ought by rights to act as a talisman to protect him