of suffocation Ledyard had managed to create, returned to
him. He grew nervous, ill at ease, and fearful.

Then he fell to moralizing. He was not often given to that, or
introspection. Longing and alternate hope and despair had been his
comrades and bedfellows, but he rarely indulged in calm consideration.
Smoking his pipe, stretched wearily on the moss, he wondered if men knew
how much they punished while fulfilling their ideals of justice?

"If only the sense of vindictiveness could be left out," he thought; "the
Lord knows they have it all in their power once the key is turned on us.
I deserved all they meant to inflict, but no human being deserves all
that was given unconsciously."

Then Farwell relived his life, while the wood crumbled to ashes and the
moon came up over the hills. A misguided, misspent boyhood; too much
money; too little common sense; then the fling in the open with every
emotion and desire uncurbed. Well, he had to learn his lesson and God
knew he had; but why, in the working of things, shouldn't one be given
a chance to prove the well-learned task; an opportunity, while among the
living, to settle the question?

However, such fancies were idle, and Farwell shook the ashes from his
pipe and gave a humorous shrug.

It would be a fine piece of work to slip from the clutches of the past
and make good! This idea caused him to tremble. Surely no one would look
for him in the camp of the upright. Walking the paths of the clean and
sane he would be more surely secure from detection than anywhere else on
earth. That was what his past had done for him. The truth of this sank
into the lonely man's soul with sickening finality. And as he realized
it, and compared it with the fact of his youth, he groaned. What an
infernal fool he had been! What fools all such fellows were who, like
him, wasted everything in their determination to make the unreal, real.
He did not now desire to be a drivelling repentant; he wanted, God knew
he really wanted, a chance to be decent and live; but in order to live he
must go on acting a part and cringing and hiding.

These thoughts led nowhere and unfitted him for his journey, so he made
the fire safe, lay down beside it, and slept as many a better man would
have given much to sleep.

At four he awoke as on the previous night. So quietly, however, did he
open his eyes that he took by surprise a man crouching by the fire as if
stealing a bit of warmth. Farwell turned over,