ened to the soft rustling of the palm
branches. The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomable
sense of homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languid
tropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belated
glimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. It carried
in to him what seemed the essential and alluring note of all the
existence he had once known and lived. Yet day by day he had fought
back that sirenic call. It had not always been an open victory--the
weight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for _her_
sake he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waiting
and looking for that final strength which would come with her first
wistful note of warning, or with her belated return to his side.

Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chance
had laid the board for its most tempting game. In that way, as the
young Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world. But
he had turned away from those clustering temptations, he had left
unbroken his veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herself
had surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form the
surrender might even at that moment be taking.

All he could do, now, was to wait until morning. There would surely be
some message, some hint, some key to the mystery. While everything
remained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past in
search of some casual seed of explanation for that still undeciphered
present.

He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopic
past career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraph
operator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on
into an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from the
railroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggle
to work his way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeks
of leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus might
be perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the
Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or two
until he and his outside confederate had been able to make their
illicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wandering
street-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch of
poverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers and
vicissitud