air."

Trent strolled through the open window into the garden, and breathed
a deep sigh of relief. He was a free man again now. He had created new
dangers--a new enemy to face--but what did he care? All his life had
been spent in facing dangers and conquering enemies. What he had done
before he could do again! As he lit a pipe and walked to and fro, he
felt that this new state of things lent a certain savour to life--took
from it a certain sensation of finality not altogether agreeable, which
his recent great achievements in the financial world seemed to have
inspired. After all, what could Da Souza do? His prosperity was
altogether bound up in the success of the Bekwando Syndicate--he was
never the man to kill the goose which was laying such a magnificent
stock of golden eggs. The affair, so far as he was concerned, troubled
him scarcely at all on cool reflection. As he drew near the little
plantation he even forgot all about it. Something else was filling his
thoughts!

The change in him became physical as well as mental. The hard face of
the man softened, what there was of coarseness in its rugged outline
became altogether toned down. He pushed open the gate with fingers which
were almost reverent; he came at last to a halt in the exact spot where
he had seen her first. Perhaps it was at that moment he realised most
completely and clearly the curious thing which had come to him--to him
of all men, hard-hearted, material, an utter stranger in the world of
feminine things. With a pleasant sense of self-abandonment he groped
about, searching for its meaning. He was a man who liked to understand
thoroughly everything he saw and felt, and this new atmosphere in which
he found himself was a curious source of excitement to him. Only he knew
that the central figure of it all was this girl, that he had come out
here to think about her, and that henceforth she had become to him the
standard of those things which were worth having in life. Everything
about her had been a revelation to him. The women whom he had come
across in his battle upwards, barmaids and their fellows, fifth-rate
actresses, occasionally the suburban wife of a prosperous City man, had
impressed him only with a sort of coarse contempt. It was marvellous how
thoroughly and clearly he had recognised Ernestine at once as a type of
that other world of womenkind, of which he admittedly knew nothing. Yet
it was so short a time since she had wandered into his life