t again the touch of her
lips on his hand. She was saying good-by, an eternal good-by, and he
had never guessed. At that very moment, and for all the moments of the
evening, coolly and deliberately, as he well knew her way, she had been
resolved to die. If he had only known it! Untouched by the contagious
malady himself, nevertheless he would have married her if he had had
the slightest inkling of what she contemplated. And yet he knew,
furthermore, that hers was a certain stiff-kneed pride that would not
have permitted her to accept marriage as an act of philanthropy. There
had really been no saving her, after all. The love-disease had fastened
upon her, and she had been doomed from the first to perish of it.

Her one possible chance had been that he, too, should have caught it.
And he had failed to catch it. Most likely, if he had, it would have
been from Freda or some other woman. There was Dartworthy, the college
man who had staked the rich fraction on Bonanza above Discovery.
Everybody knew that old Doolittle's daughter, Bertha, was madly in love
with him. Yet, when he contracted the disease, of all women, it had
been with the wife of Colonel Walthstone, the great Guggenhammer mining
expert. Result, three lunacy cases: Dartworthy selling out his mine for
one-tenth its value; the poor woman sacrificing her respectability and
sheltered nook in society to flee with him in an open boat down the
Yukon; and Colonel Walthstone, breathing murder and destruction, taking
out after them in another open boat. The whole impending tragedy had
moved on down the muddy Yukon, passing Forty Mile and Circle and losing
itself in the wilderness beyond. But there it was, love, disorganizing
men's and women's lives, driving toward destruction and death, turning
topsy-turvy everything that was sensible and considerate, making bawds
or suicides out of virtuous women, and scoundrels and murderers out of
men who had always been clean and square.

For the first time in his life Daylight lost his nerve. He was badly
and avowedly frightened. Women were terrible creatures, and the
love-germ was especially plentiful in their neighborhood.

And they were so reckless, so devoid of fear. THEY were not frightened
by what had happened to the Virgin. They held out their arms to him
more seductively than ever. Even without his fortune, reckoned as a
mere man, just past thirty, magnificently strong and equally
good-looking and good-natu