to take.

Knowing that at San Francisco, to which he had booked, he would have to
run the gauntlet of certain of his friends and business connections, he
made haste to leave the ship quietly at Portland, the first point she
touched on her southern journey. Thence he got on the Canadian Pacific
Line and took his way to Montreal.

What most arrested his attention, and in a very disconcerting way, were
the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfully here and
there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on him so
overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acute feeling of
course soon became mitigated; but it was the beginning of a
re-realisation of what had been, and which grew stronger with each mile
as the train swept back eastward.

At first he tried to fight it; tried with all the resources of his strong
nature. His mind was made up, he assured himself over and over again.
The past was past, and what had been was no more to him than to any of
the other passengers of the train. Destiny had long ago fulfilled
itself. Stephen no doubt had by now found some one worthy of her and had
married. In no dream, sleeping or waking, could he ever admit that she
had married Leonard; that was the only gleam of comfort in what had grown
to be remorse for his neglected duty.

And so it was that Harold An Wolf slowly drifted, though he knew it not,
into something of the same intellectual position which had dominated him
when he had started on his journeying and the sunset fell nightly on his
despairing face. The life in the wilderness, and then in the dominance
and masterdom of enterprise, had hardened and strengthened him into more
self-reliant manhood, giving him greater forbearance and a more practical
view of things.

When he took ship in the _Dominion_, a large cargo-boat with some
passengers running to London, he had a vague purpose of visiting in
secret Norcester, whence he could manage to find out how matters were at
Normanstand. He would then, he felt, be in a better position to regulate
his further movements. He knew that he had already a sufficient disguise
in his great beard. He had nothing to fear from the tracing of him on
his journey from Alaska or the interest of his fellow-passengers. He had
all along been so fortunate as to be able to keep his identity concealed.
The name John Robinson told nothing in itself, and the width of a whole
great continent lay between him and