o the human heart.
Hate seized upon him with a force even greater perhaps than the passions
that had hitherto swayed him, and hard on the heels of hate came a deep,
burning desire for revenge.

His desire was not against the woman who had wronged and deceived him. A
sort of pitying contempt had replaced the wealth of passionate devotion
he had lavished. His whole desire was against the man. And, curiously
enough, this fevered desire became a sort of palliative drug which left
him with the necessary strength to withstand the pain of his heart.

Slowly at first it took possession of him, but, with each passing day,
it grew, until, at last, it occupied him to the exclusion of everything.
Even the thought of his child, that tender atom of humanity who had been
a living part of him, and whose soft lips and baby hands could never
again become anything more than a memory, was powerless to rob him of
one particle of the cold delight, as, in a hundred ways, he discovered
the broken, dead body of the man who had wronged him within the grasp of
his merciless hands.

But none of this was outwardly visible. It was concealed with the rest.
And so the cynicism of Syme, and the general comfort of those who came
to cheer the sick room of a valued comrade.

So it came that one day, towards the end of Steve's convalescence, the
Superintendent found himself occupying the solitary chair, with Steve
lounging smoking on the be-patterned coverlet of the bed, talking of the
Unaga Indians and their habits of hibernation which sounded so
incredible to the man who had never seen for himself.

Steve had a bunch of mail lying on the bed beside him. He had been
reading when his superior had made his appearance. But his reading had
been discarded while he gave full attention to the man under whom he had
served so long and for whom he possessed no small measure of regard.

Steve had been talking in his deliberate, assured manner, and McDowell,
alert, keen-eyed, half smiling had been listening to the story of a
mysterious weed of marvellous narcotic powers. Curiously enough Steve
had imparted only the briefest outline. He had told nothing of all that
which he had read and discovered in Marcel Brand's laboratory. He had
forgotten even to point the fact that he was a chemist first and only a
trader through circumstances. There were many other things, too, that
Steve omitted. Nor was the reason for the omission clear. It may have
been forgetfulness.