, "was no large sum, but I eked it out with
gambling. The luck was always on my side. It's quite true that I
ruined the father of the young lady who paid me a visit to-day. After a
somewhat chequered career he was settling down in a merchant's office in
Montreal when I met him. His luck at cards was as bad as mine was good.
I won all he had, and more. I believe that he committed suicide. A man
there was kind to me, asked me to his house--I persuaded his wife to run
away with me. These are amongst the slightest of my delinquencies. I
steeped myself in sin. I revelled in it. I seemed to myself in some
way to be showing my defiance for the hidden powers of life which I had
cursed. I played a match with evil by day and by night until I was
glutted. And then I stole away from the city, leaving behind a hideous
reputation and not a single friend. Then a new mood came to me. I
wanted to get to a place where I should see no human beings at all, and
escape in that way from the memories which were still like a clot upon
my brain. So I set my face westwards. I travelled till at last
civilization lay behind. Still I pushed onward. I had stores in
plenty, an Indian servant who chanced to be faithful, and whom I saw
but twice a day. At last I reached Lake Ono. Here between us we built
a hut. I sent my Indian away then, and when he fawned at my feet to
stay I kicked him. This was my third phase of living, and it was true
that some measure of sanity came back to me. Oh, the blessed relief of
seeing the face of neither man nor woman. It was the unpeopled world of
Nature--uncorrupted, fresh, magnificent, alive by day and by night with
everlasting music of Nature. The solitudes of those great forests were
like a wonderful balm. So the fevers were purged out of me, and I
became once more an ordinary human being. I was content, I think, to
die there, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and the animals and birds
who came to me morning and evening kept me from even the thought of
loneliness. The rest is obvious. I lost two cousins in South Africa,
an uncle in the hunting-field. A man in Montreal had recognized me. I
was discovered. But before I returned I killed Brooks, the police-court
missionary. This girl has forced me to bring him to life again."

It was a strange silence which followed. Brooks sat back in his chair,
pale, bewildered, striving to focus this story properly, to attain a
proper comprehension of these new strange things. And be