he would never look on her again.
They had not understood one another, and now, with whatever longing he
might desire it, he could never explain. He had abandoned her for the
sake of his father's quest, that he might seek out El Dorado--and this
was the wage of his sacrifice, thirty, perhaps forty long years of
life at Murder Point, shared in the company of a squaw, a hurried
burial one day, and an unnoticed grave.

He could not accept the conditions set forth in the lawyer's letter
and return to London in the two months which remained--there were the
Mounted Police to prevent him, and there was Peggy. He had chosen his
own path in life, and he must follow it without complaint to the
bitter end. He tried to think himself back into the opinion of the
morning, when he had fancied that he preferred the Last Chance River
to any other place. He could not think that now; he knew that it was
no more than a consoling lie. Then he ceased to think and grew drowsy.

He was aroused by the faint and far-away sound of singing. The dusk
had gathered and it must be nearing midnight. He was stiff from
sitting so long in a cramped position; he rose to his feet and rubbed
his eyes. The window was ruddy with the shifting light of the Indians'
camp-fire; occasionally, when the flame shot up, its brightness stole
across the ceiling and illumined the walls of the store. He listened;
the tune that was sung seemed to him familiar and puzzled him, for he
was not fully awake. Drifting through the stillness of the northern
twilight, at an hour when even the beasts of the forests held their
breath because of God's nearness and His solemnity, there reached his
ears the vulgar strutting tones of a music-hall singer's voice:

"As I walked through Leicester Square
With my most magnificent air,
You should hear the girls declare
'Why, he's a millionaire;'
And they turn around and sigh,
And they wink the other eye,
'He's the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.'"

The coarse suggestiveness of the words, the cheap passions which they
implied, the leer and pomposity with which they had been uttered by
the comedian, the unhealthy, narrow-chested, pavement-bred audience
by which the effort had been greeted with applause, the total
uncleanness and unnaturalness of city-life, came vividly home to him.

He did not stop to reason, or to trace his repugnance to its
source--to his native hostility to the impurity and strengthl