at blossom in your cheeks, and the morning in your eyes?'
'I got them on the North Trail, the road that never closes,
That widens to the seven gold gates of paradise.'
'O come, let us camp in the North Trail together,
With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down.'"

Left alone, the man by the reedy lake stood watching them until they
were out of view. The song came back to him, echoing across the waters:

"O come, let us camp on the North Trail together,
With the night-fires lit and the tent-pegs down."

The sunset glow, the girl's presence, had given him a moment's illusion,
had absorbed him for a moment, acting on his deadened nature like a
narcotic at once soothing and stimulating. As some wild animal in
a forgotten land, coming upon ruins of a vast civilisation, towers,
temples, and palaces, in the golden glow of an Eastern evening, stands
abashed and vaguely wondering, having neither reason to understand, nor
feeling to enjoy, yet is arrested and abashed, so he stood. He had lived
the last three years so much alone, had been cut off so completely from
his kind--had lived so much alone. Yet to-night, at last, he would not
be alone.

Some one was coming to-night, some one whom he had not seen for a long
time. Letters had passed, the object of the visit had been defined, and
he had spent the intervening days since the last letter had arrived, now
agitated, now apathetic and sullen, now struggling with some invisible
being that kept whispering in his ear, saying to him, "It was the price
of fire, and blood, and shame. You did it--you--you--you! You are down,
and you will never get up. You can only go lower still--fire, and blood,
and shame!"

Criminal as he was he had never become hardened, he had only become
degraded. Crime was not his vocation. He had no gift for it; still the
crime he had committed had never been discovered--the crime that he
did with others. There were himself and Dupont and another. Dupont was
coming to-night--Dupont who had profited by the crime, and had not spent
his profits, but had built upon them to further profit; for Dupont was
avaricious and prudent, and a born criminal. Dupont had never had any
compunctions or remorse, had never lost a night's sleep because of what
they two had done, instigated thereto by the other, who had paid them so
well for the dark thing.

The other was Henderley, the financier. He was worse perhaps than
Dupont, for he was in