bed-chamber. He saw with eyes wide
open and brain alert a picture that looked like a reality and not a
vision.

It was of a trembling man bent with age and loneliness.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALL OF ETERNITY

Elsie walked on and on eastward towards the lake. For a week she had been
living alone in a room she had found near the park on the night that she
left Harvey Spencer, telephoning in the drug-store. She had resolved that
instant to go. It was to be "Now or never"--and she hurried away in an
opposite direction from the hiding place--and from Druce.

The little money that he had put in her hands for drugs had somehow
lasted her until now. She had been too ill to go out, her body racked
with fever.

She was conscious that she must tomorrow find some work to do, for the
landlady had twice asked her for the next week's rent. She looked in at
the door of a laundry where a German woman was singing as she ironed
children's dresses by the light of a flaring gas jet. It looked pleasant
and peaceful in there. Perhaps that motherly woman would let her work
with her. She would see tomorrow.

Elsie walked on towards the lake. She wanted to look at the water. She
wanted to breathe the cool breath of great winds coming over the water to
cool this fierce fire of shame and horror fevering her soul, flaming in
her delicate cheeks.

Elsie came to the lake front at a wide high lot between two comfortable
mansions on Sheridan Road.

Lights of homes shone through the night's darkness. Beams as of sunshine
danced across the water.

A light from an upper chamber in the nearest home shone across her and
streamed onward to the sands.

Elsie stood clasping and unclasping her little slender hands. The
waters,--they could wash away that blow, the marks of that blow, wash
away those words threatening death from one who had killed something in
her heart. She realized that she was not afraid, facing the life to come.

She was afraid only to go on living in the same world with one who had
taken her girlhood and her womanhood, afraid only of this frightful fever
in her veins, of this poison that was consuming her.

Out yonder were the cool deeps of death--of death? What then? Far across
the waves she saw a light.

It was as if her spirit went to meet the light, went in quest of the
meaning of such a beacon light across black waters.

The light seemed to grow bigger and bi