vacant air. It was illumined by a
steady and desperate defiance, for the old man was denying his body to
the grave.

The scene changed for Randall Byrne. The girl disappeared. The walls of
the room were broken away. The eyes of the world looked in upon him and
the wise men of the world kept pace with him up and down the room,
shaking their heads and saying: "It is not possible!"

But the fact lay there to contradict them.

Prometheus stole fire from heaven and paid it back to an eternal death.
The old cattleman was refusing his payment. It was no state of coma in
which he lay; it was no prolonged trance. He was vitally, vividly alive;
he was concentrating with a bitter and exhausting vigour day and night,
and fighting a battle the more terrible because it was fought in
silence, a battle in which he could receive no aid, no reinforcement, a
battle in which he could not win, but in which he might delay defeat.

Ay, the wise men would smile and shake their heads when he presented
this case to their consideration, but he would make his account so
accurate and particular and so well witnessed that they would have to
admit the truth of all he said. And science, which proclaimed that
matter was indestructible and that the mind was matter and that the
brain needed nourishment like any other muscle--science would have to
hang the head and wonder!

The eyes of the girl brought him to halt in his pacing, and he stopped,
confronting her. His excitement had transformed him. His nostrils were
quivering, his eyes were pointed with light, his head was high, and he
breathed fast. He was flushed as the Roman Conqueror. And his excitement
tinged the girl, also, with colour.

She offered to take him to his room as soon as he wished to go. He was
quite willing. He wanted to be alone, to think. But when he followed her
she stopped him in the hall. Buck Daniels lumbered slowly after them in
a clumsy attempt at sauntering.

"Well?" asked Kate Cumberland.

She had thrown a blue mantle over her shoulders when she entered the
house, and the touch of boyish self-confidence which had been hers on
the ride was gone. In its place there was something even more difficult
for Randall Byrne to face. If there had been a garish brightness about
her when he had first seen her, the brilliancy of a mirror playing in
the sun against his feeble eyes, there was now a blending of pastel
shades, for the hall was dimly illumined and the shadow tarnished h