d be
revenged. The savage in him was covered by the thin veneer of
civilisation, but it was there.

He seemed in a strange mood as he walked rapidly across the moors.
Sometimes he laughed quietly, as though some pleasant thought possessed
him, and again he became moody, stern, and silent. But he was no longer
the "Eastern gentleman with a fez." The day was warm, and he had clothed
himself in a suit of light flannels, and instead of a fez he wore a
panama. In spite of his black beard and brown skin he would no longer be
taken for an Eastern. Every movement was that of an athletic Englishman.
He was no longer acting a part; the old life was soon to come to an end,
and he would begin anew. What that new life was he hardly dared to
confess even to himself, but it was there, in the background of his
mind.

"I have won, I have got my way, I have conquered," he said again and
again as he strode along. "God, if there is a God, is giving me my
revenge. And if there is any justice in the world, it is just."

Hour after hour he walked; he seemed to be trying to tire himself, to,
in some way, throw off the abundant energy that surged within him.
Presently he came to a shady dell, where he stopped. At his feet gurgled
a stream of clear water. He lay flat on his face and took a long, deep
drink.

"I wonder what whisky would taste like now," he said to himself. "It is
six years since I touched it, six years; but the first year was a year
of torment."

He shuddered at the thought of it. The memory of the time when it held
him enslaved was terrible to him even yet.

"But I conquered it," he went on; "I vowed I would, and I have. Had the
struggle been ten times as hard, I would have conquered it. No man is
master of anything if whisky masters him."

He sat down beneath the tree and ate a simple lunch, then, taking
another deep draught of the water, he continued his walk. A high hill
was in front of him covered with gorse and bracken. In a few minutes he
reached the top, and then he looked around him.

A look of recognition came into his eyes. He saw the cottage at which he
had stayed after he had been driven out of Taviton; away in the distance
was the pool which the country people said was haunted by the devil. He
remembered it when he saw it last as dark and forbidding, but to-day it
gleamed in the sunlight. Below him, not much more than a mile away, was
the farmhouse in which he had sheltered himself from a storm, when he
w