med him.
"When I go to sleep tonight, I shall put these violets near the head of
my bed, and whenever I wake up I'll smell them."

* * * * *

Despite his strong defensive preparations and his almost clairvoyant
foresight, in Hamilton Burton an insidious change was taking place and
the brain which so astutely cooerdinated many things was totally
unconscious of its own transitions. Egotism had made him. A self-faith
which took no account of difficulties, had carried him to the apex of
his ambitions. Now it was blinding him with its own brilliance. Hamilton
Burton was drunk, drunk to the core of his soul, with the strong
intoxicant of self-confidence. He looked on life through a mirror--and
saw only himself.

So, while he intrenched and safeguarded his destiny, he failed to
realize that he was being lulled into a reckless faith in the star he
believed shone over him and for him. He did not pause to reflect that
the wolf, gaunt and powerful, who by the courage in his shaggy breast
and the strength of his fanged jaws, runs unchallenged at the pack head,
may change.

He took no account of the fact that the wolf gorged is the wolf
weakened.

As his plans grew his methods became more unscrupulous and his scorn for
forms of law increased.

One day he sat in his mother's house showing her, with the enthusiastic
glee of a child for new toys, several freshly acquired miniatures of the
First Napoleon.

Mrs. Burton turned one of the priceless trinkets over in her hand and
gazed at it wonderingly. It was a small thing, wrought on ivory by Jean
Baptiste Jacques Augustin and framed in pearls. She thought she had seen
more flattering portrayals of the round head which stared out from the
jewelled circlet.

"I suppose," she said with such a sigh as mothers utter when they fail
to understand with full sympathy the enthusiasms of their children, "I
ought to rave over this. From your eyes I realize that it is
treasure-trove and yet to me it is meaningless. Of course," she naively
added, "the pearls are very pretty."

Tenderly, Hamilton stooped and kissed her forehead, then he took the
miniature from her hand and stood looking at the painted face. He stood
straight and lithe, and he spoke slowly:

"Sometimes I wonder if the belief in reincarnation is not the truest
faith, mother. Sometimes, I seem to look back on the career of this man
as on something in an unforgotten past. To me it is all more vi