er, I'll be able to use the
capital in a way to provide for all of us. If I don't come back, you'll
be secure against want as long as you live."

He made good his word before his leave was up. He had very nearly lost
faith in the value of money, of any material thing. He had struggled for
money and power for a purpose, to demonstrate that he was a man equal to
any man's struggle. He had signally failed in his purpose, for reasons
that were still a little obscure to him. Failure had made him a little
bitter, bred a pessimism it took the plight of his aunts to cure. Even
if he had failed to achieve his heart's desire he had acquired power to
make two lives content. Save that it ministered to his self-respect to
know that he could win in that fierce struggle of the marketplace, money
had lost its high value for him. Money was only a means, not an end. But
to have it, to be able to bestow it where it was sadly needed, was worth
while, after all. If he "crashed" over there, it was something to have
banished the grim spectre of want from these two who were old and
helpless.

He was thinking of this along with a jumble of other thoughts as he
leaned on the rail of a transport slipping with lights doused out of the
port of Halifax. There was a lump in his throat because of those two old
women who had cried over him and clung to him when he left them. There
was another woman on the other side of the continent to whom his going
meant nothing, he supposed, save a duty laggardly performed. And he
would have sold his soul to feel _her_ arms around his neck and her lips
on his before he went.

"Oh, well," he muttered to himself as he watched the few harbor lights
falling astern, yellow pin-points on the velvety black of the shore,"
this is likely to be the finish of _that_. I think I've burned my last
bridge. And I have learned to stand on my own feet, whether she believes
so or not."

CHAPTER XXVII

THOMPSON'S RETURN

"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."

On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific
train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves
and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging
imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt
beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of
a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below