is in him and throw him out. To-morrow Vane Sahib
shall be as well as ever."

"Do your best for him, Koda. This is the first time, and I hope the
last. Good-night."

"Good-night, friend of the friendless," replied the Pathan, standing up
and stretching out his hands palms downwards. "Fear nothing. May your
sleep be as the repose of Nirvana."

But there was neither rest nor sleep for Sir Arthur Maxwell that night.
That vision of the girl's face looking out of the cab had been to him a
vision half of heaven and half of hell. It was the face of the girl he
had wooed and worked for and won nearly thirty years before--a girl
whose hands for a brief space had opened the gates of Paradise to him.
But it was also the face of a woman who had brought into his life
something worse than the bitterness of death.

As he paced up and down his bedroom through the still, lonely hours of
the night, he asked himself again and again what inscrutable fate had
brought this girl, the fresh, bright, living image of the woman who was
worse than dead, and his son Vane, the idol of his heart, and the hope
of his life, together.

Why had this girl, this outcast bearing the name which he both loved and
hated, been the first to see in his son's eyes that fatal sign which he
knew so well, a sign which he had himself seen in eyes into which he had
once looked as a lad of twenty-four with anxious adoration to read his
fate in them. For years that flickering, wavering light had been to him
like the reflected glare from the flames of hell, and now this girl had
seen it as he had seen it, mocking and devilish in the eyes of his only
son.

It would have been better--he saw that now--to have braced himself to
the task of telling Vane the whole of the miserable, pitiful story at
once, as soon, indeed, as Vane's own story had convinced him that he had
not escaped the curse which some dead and gone ancestor of his mother's
had transmitted to his unborn posterity.

But it was a hard thing for a father to tell his son of his mother's
shame. As hard, surely, as it had been for Jephtha to keep his rash vow
and drive the steel into his daughter's breast. He had hoped that the
resolves which Vane had taken, enforced by a serious and friendly talk
the next day, would have been enough to avert the danger.

He did not know, as he knew now, that the demon of inherited alcoholism
laughs at such poor precautions as this. Measures infinitely more
drastic would be