o the night, he
walked back to the wall and, dashing more water over the spot he had
already moistened, began to pick at the loosened edges of the paper
which were slowly falling away. The result was a disappointment; how
great a disappointment he presently realised, as his knife-point
encountered only plaster under the peeling edges of the paper. He had
hoped to find other paper under the blue--the paper which Miss Demarest
remembered--and not finding it, was conscious of a sinking of the heart
which had never attended any of his miscalculations before. Were his own
feelings involved in this matter? It would certainly seem so.

Astonished at his own sensations, he crossed back to the table, and
sinking into the chair beside it, endeavoured to call up his common
sense, or at least shake himself free from the glamour which had seized
him. But this especial sort of glamour is not so easily shaken off.
Minutes passed--an hour, and little else filled his thoughts than the
position of this bewitching girl and the claims she had on his sense of
justice. If he listened, it was to hear her voice raised in appeal at
his door. If he closed his eyes, it was to see her image more plainly on
the background of his consciousness. The stillness into which the house
had sunk aided this absorption and made his battle a losing one. There
was naught to distract his mind, and when he dozed, as he did for a
while after midnight, it was to fall under the conjuring effect of
dreams in which her form dominated with all the force of an unfettered
fancy. The pictures which his imagination thus brought before him were
startling and never to be forgotten. The first was that of an angry sea
in the blue light of an arctic winter. Stars flecked the zenith and shed
a pale lustre on the moving ice-floes hurrying toward a horizon of
skurrying clouds and rising waves. On one of those floes stood a woman
alone, with face set toward her death.

The scene changed. A desert stretched out before him. Limitless, with
the blazing colours of the arid sand topped by a cloudless sky, it
revealed but one suggestion of life in its herbless, waterless,
shadowless solitude. _She_ stood in the midst of this desert, and as he
had seen her sway on the ice-floe, so he saw her now stretching
unavailing arms to the brazen heavens and sink--No! it was not a desert,
it was not a sea, ice-bound or torrid, it was a toppling city, massed
against impenetrable night one moment, th