ill reserve it. And listen, when I locked that door it
was with a purpose. I had no mind to let you leave as you are leaving.
Never mind. You can go--only be quick."

Francis paused upon the threshold. "You understand," he said
significantly.

"I understand," Trent answered.

* * * * *

An hour passed, and Trent still remained in the chair before his
writing-table, his head upon his hand, his eyes fixed upon vacancy.
Afterwards he always thought of that hour as one of the bitterest of
his life. A strong and self-reliant man, he had all his life ignored
companionship, had been well content to live without friends,
self-contained and self-sufficient. To-night the spectre of a great
loneliness sat silently by his side! His heart was sore, his pride had
been bitterly touched, the desire and the whole fabric of his life was
in imminent and serious danger.

The man who had left him was an enemy and a prejudiced man, but Trent
knew that he was honest. He was the first human being to whom he had
ever betrayed the solitary ambition of his life, and his scornful words
seemed still to bite the air. If--he was right! Why not? Trent looked
with keen, merciless eyes through his past, and saw never a thing there
to make him glad. He had started life a workman, with a few ambitions'
all of a material nature--he had lived the life of a cold, scheming
money-getter, absolutely selfish, negatively moral, doing little evil
perhaps, but less good. There was nothing in his life to make him worthy
of a woman's love, most surely there was nothing which could ever make
it possible that such a woman as Ernestine Wendermott should ever
care for him. All the wealth of Africa could never make him anything
different from what he was. And yet, as he sat and realised this, he
knew that he was writing down his life a failure. For, beside his desire
for her, there were no other things he cared for in life. Already he was
weary of financial warfare--the City life had palled upon him. He looked
around the magnificent room in the mansion which his agents had bought
and furnished for him. He looked at the pile of letters waiting for him
upon his desk, little square envelopes many of them, but all telling the
same tale, all tributes to his great success, and the mockery of it all
smote hard upon the walls of his fortitude. Lower and lower his head
drooped until it was buried in his folded arms--and the hour wh