at Le Pas, and learned that no one
had seen or heard of Thorpe and his wife. Two days later he walked into
MacGregor's office. The inspector fairly leaped from his chair to greet
him.

"You got them, Steele!" he cried. "You got them after the mur--the
killing of Hodges?"

Philip handed him a crumpled bit of paper.

"Those were your latest instructions, sir," he replied quietly. "I
followed them to the letter."

MacGregor read, and his face turned as white as the paper he held. "Good
God!" he gasped.

He reeled rather than walked back to his desk, dropped into a chair
and buried his face in his arms, his shoulders shaking like those of a
sobbing boy. It was a long time before he looked up, and during these
minutes Philip, with his head bowed low to the other, told him of all
that had happened in the little room at Wekusko. But he did not say that
it was he who had surprised the guard and released Thorpe and his wife.

At last MacGregor raised his head.

"Philip," he said, taking the young man's hand in both his own, "since
she was a little girl and I a big, strapping playmate of nineteen, I
have loved her. She is the only girl--the only woman--I have ever loved.
You understand? I am almost old enough to be her father. She was never
intended for me. But things like this happen--sometimes, and when she
came to plead with me the other day I almost yielded. That is why I
chose you, warned you--"

He stopped, and a sob rose in his breast.

"And at last you did yield," said Philip.

The inspector gazed at him for a moment in silence. Then he said:
"It was ten years ago, on her seventeenth birthday, that I made her a
present of a little silver-bound autograph book, and on the first page
of that book I wrote the words which saved her husband--and her. Do you
understand now, Philip? It was her last card, and she played it well."

He smiled faintly, and then said, as if to no one but himself, "God
bless her!"

He looked down on the big, tawny head that was bowed again upon the
desk, and placed his hands on the other's shoulders.

"God bless her!" echoed Philip.

"You are not alone in your sorrows, Felix MacGregor," he said softly.
"You asked me if I was beauty-proof. Yes, I am. And it is because of
something like this, because of a face and a soul that have filled
my heart, because of a woman that is not mine, and never can be mine,
because of a love which ever burns, and must never be known--it is
because of t