hrouded in spectral light, where all seemed unreal.

And with it the gray-gloomed giant of Wade's mind, the morbid and
brooding spell, had gained its long-encroaching ascendancy. He had again
found the man to whom he must tell his story. Tragic and irrevocable
decree! It was his life that forced him, his crime, his remorse, his
agony, his endless striving. How true had been his steps! They had led,
by devious and tortuous paths, to the home of his daughter.

Wade crouched under the aspens, accepting this burden as a man being
physically loaded with tremendous weights. His shoulders bent to them.
His breast was sunken and labored. All his muscles were cramped. His
blood flowed sluggishly. His heart beat with slow, muffled throbs in his
ears. There was a creeping cold in his veins, ice in his marrow, and
death in his soul. The giant that had been shrouded in gray threw off
his cloak, to stand revealed, black and terrible. And it was he who
spoke to Wade, in dreadful tones, like knells. Bent Wade--man of
misery--who could find no peace on earth--whose presence unknit the
tranquil lives of people and poisoned their blood and marked them for
doom! Wherever he wandered there followed the curse! Always this had
been so. He was the harbinger of catastrophe. He who preached wisdom
and claimed to be taught by the flowers, who loved life and hated
injustice, who mingled with his kind, ever searching for that one who
needed him, he must become the woe and the bane and curse of those he
would only serve! Insupportable and pitiful fate! The fiends of the past
mocked him, like wicked ghouls, voiceless and dim. The faces of the men
he had killed were around him in the gray gloom, pale, drifting visages
of distortion, accusing him, claiming him. Likewise, these gleams of
faces were specters of his mind, a procession eternal, mournful, and
silent, wending their way on and on through the regions of his thought.
All were united, all drove him, all put him on the trail of catastrophe.
They foreshadowed the future, they inclosed events, they lured him with
his endless illusions. He was in the vortex of a vast whirlpool, not of
water or of wind, but of life. Alas! he seemed indeed the very current
of that whirlpool, a monstrous force, around which evil circled and
lurked and conquered. Wade--who had the ill-omened croak of the
raven--Wade--who bent his driven steps toward hell!

* * * * *

In the brilliant su