t his son stood in deadly peril,
and Dr. Cairn counted the hours that yet divided them. His soul was up
in arms against the man whose evil schemes had led to his presence in
Port Said, at a time when many sufferers required his ministrations in
Half-Moon Street. He was haunted by a phantom, a ghoul in human shape;
Antony Ferrara, the adopted son of his dear friend, the adopted son,
who had murdered his adopter, who whilst guiltless in the eyes of the
law, was blood-guilty in the eyes of God!

Dr. Cairn switched on the light and seated himself upon the side of
the bed, knitting his brows and staring straight before him, with an
expression in his clear grey eyes whose significance he would have
denied hotly, had any man charged him with it. He was thinking of
Antony Ferrara's record; the victims of this fiendish youth (for
Antony Ferrara was barely of age) seemed to stand before him with
hands stretched out appealingly.

"You alone," they seemed to cry, "know who and what he is! You alone
know of our awful wrongs; you alone can avenge them!"

And yet he had hesitated! It had remained for his own flesh and blood
to be threatened ere he had taken decisive action. The viper had lain
within his reach, and he had neglected to set his heel upon it. Men
and women had suffered and had died of its venom; and he had not
crushed it. Then Robert, his son, had felt the poison fang, and Dr.
Cairn, who had hesitated to act upon the behalf of all humanity, had
leapt to arms. He charged himself with a parent's selfishness, and his
conscience would hear no defence.

Dimly, the turmoil from the harbour reached him where he sat. He
listened dully to the hooting of a syren--that of some vessel coming
out of the canal.

His thoughts were evil company, and, with a deep sigh, he rose,
crossed the room and threw open the double windows, giving access to
the balcony.

Port Said, a panorama of twinkling lights, lay beneath him. The beam
from the lighthouse swept the town searchingly like the eye of some
pagan god lustful for sacrifice. He imagined that he could hear the
shouting of the gangs coaling the liner in the harbour; but the night
was full of the remote murmuring inseparable from that gateway of the
East. The streets below, white under the moon, looked empty and
deserted, and the hotel beneath him gave up no sound to tell of the
many birds of passage who sheltered within it. A stunning sense of his
loneliness came to him; his physic