am old and
independent, with a liking to do what I please. Malcolm Stratton, I am
not answerable to any man for my actions."

Stratton started up, and took a turn to and fro in the dusty room before
throwing himself again in his chair, while the old man quietly took the
long, snake like tube of his pipe in hand, examined the bowl to find it
still alight, began to smoke with all the gravity of a Mussulman, and
the tobacco once more began to scent the air of the silent place.

Stratton's lips parted again and again, but no words would come. In his
wild excitement and dread of what he knew he must learn, he could not
frame the questions he panted to ask in this crisis of his life, and at
last it was with a cry of rage as much as appeal that he said:

"Man, man, am I to be tortured always? Why don't you speak?"

"You have hunted me from place to place, Malcolm Stratton, in your
desperation to find out that which I felt you had better not know; and
now you have found me--brought me to bay--I wait for you to question
me."

"Yes, yes," said Stratton hoarsely; and, with a hasty gesture, as he
clapped his hand to his throat, "I will speak--directly."

He rose again and paced the room, and it was while at the far end that
he said in a low voice:

"Yes; you know all."

"All."

"Tell me, then--why have you done this? Stop! I am right--it was you."

"You are right; it was I," said Brettison, smoking calmly, as if they
were discoursing upon some trivial matter instead of a case of life and
death--of the horror that had blasted a sanguine man's life, and made
him prematurely old.

"Tell me, then; how could you--how could you dare? Why did you act the
spy upon my actions?"

The old man rose quickly from his chair, brought his hand down heavily
upon the table, and leaned forward to gaze in Stratton's eyes.

"Answer me first, boy. Me--the man who loved you and felt toward you as
if you were a son! Why did you not come to me for help and counsel when
you stood in danger--in peril of your life?"

The gentle, mild face of the old botanist was stern and judicial now,
his tone of voice full of reproof. It was the judge speaking, and not
the mild old friend.

"Did you think me--because I passed my life trifling, as some call it,
with flowers, but, as I know it to be, making myself wiser in the works
of my great Creator--did you think me, I say, so weak and helpless a
creature that I could not counsel--so cowardly an