ith a note of half-shamed gratitude. "I want
to thank you," he added. "You were brave. It would have turned on you
if you had missed. I know them. I've killed five." He spoke very slowly,
huskily.

"Well, you are safe--that is the chief thing," she rejoined, making
as though to depart. But presently she turned back. "Why are you so
dreadfully poor--and everything?" she asked gently.

His eye wandered over the lake and back again before he answered her,
in a dull, heavy tone: "I've had bad luck, and, when you get down, there
are plenty to kick you farther."

"You weren't always poor as you are now--I mean long ago, when you were
young."

"I'm not so old," he rejoined sluggishly--"only thirty-four."

She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already
grey, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.

"Yet it must seem long to you," she said with meaning. Now he laughed--a
laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his boyhood. Everything,
save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim in his
debilitated mind.

"Too far to go back," he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which
had been strong in him once.

She caught the gleam. She had wisdom beyond her years. It was the
greater because her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to
dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled
his household, and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was
not of the labouring classes, that he had known better days; his speech,
if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical.

"If you cannot go back, you can go forwards," she said firmly. "Why
should you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this,
who is idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when
there is so much time to sleep at night?"

A faint flush came on the greyish, colourless face. "I don't sleep at
night," he returned moodily.

"Why don't you sleep?" she asked.

He did not answer, but stirred the body of the snake with his foot. The
tail moved; he stamped upon the head with almost frenzied violence, out
of keeping with his sluggishness.

She turned away, yet looked back once more--she felt tragedy around her.
"It is never too late to mend," she said, and moved on, but stopped; for
a young man came running from the woods towards her.

"I've had a hunt--such a hunt for you," the young man said eagerly,
then stopped short when he saw to whom she had been ta