it. Did not that in some measure make
amends? The problem was too complicated; it must work itself out in
its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had
travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill
Spurling in the end--Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord.
Still more burlesque would it be if, after Spurling was at rest, he
should be hanged in his stead.

But perhaps Mordaunt was not dead.

To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter
memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to
remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which
threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once
asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the
Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of
it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up
there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the
thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he
might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again
in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its
homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and
general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the
bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house
was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls
of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through
flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford
raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed
up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of
High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight.
This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the
glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the
same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of
the walls and masonry, so interwoven was it with his memories of that
house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened
to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with
the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters'
nights.

The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than
five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the
dream on the other s