pectful distance, Reginald began--at first leisurely, a man of the
world. But as he proceeded a strange exultation seemed to possess him
and from his eyes leaped the flame of the mystic.

"You must pardon me," he commenced, "if I monopolise the conversation,
but the revelations I have to make are of such a nature that I may well
claim your attention. I will start with my earliest childhood. You
remember the picture of me that was taken when I was five?"

She remembered, indeed. Each detail of his life was deeply engraven on
her mind.

"At that time," he continued, "I was not held to be particularly bright.
The reason was that my mind, being pre-eminently and extraordinarily
receptive, needed a stimulus from without. The moment I was sent to
school, however, a curious metamorphosis took place in me. I may say
that I became at once the most brilliant boy in my class. You know that
to this day I have always been the most striking figure in any circle in
which I have ever moved."

Ethel nodded assent. Silently watching the speaker, she saw a gleam of
the truth from afar, but still very distant and very dim.

Reginald lifted the glass against the light and gulped its contents.
Then in a lower voice he recommenced: "Like the chameleon, I have the
power of absorbing the colour of my environment."

"Do you mean that you have the power of absorbing the special virtues
of other people?" she interjected.

"That is exactly what I mean."

"Oh!" she cried, for in a heart-beat many things had become clear to
her. For the first time she realised, still vaguely but with increasing
vividness, the hidden causes of her ruin and, still more plainly, the
horrible danger of Ernest Fielding.

He noticed her agitation, and a look of psychological curiosity came
into his eyes.

"Ah, but that is not all," he observed, smilingly. "That is nothing. We
all possess that faculty in a degree. The secret of my strength is my
ability to reject every element that is harmful or inessential to the
completion of my self. This did not come to me easily, nor without a
struggle. But now, looking back upon my life, many things become
transparent that were obscure even to me at the time. I can now follow
the fine-spun threads in the intricate web of my fate, and discover in
the wilderness of meshes a design, awful and grandly planned."

His voice shook with conviction, as he uttered these words. There was
something strangely gruesome in this man. It