he pleased. Once when she had visited the Coast the Governor had talked
to her with great gusto and friendliness; and she had even gone so far
as to touch his arm while, chuckling at her whimsically, he listened
to a story she told him of life at the rail-head. And the Governor had
patted her fingers in quite a fatherly way--or not, as the mind of the
observer saw it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to
her.

"So you've been gambling again--you've broken your promise to me," she
said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter in
her eyes.

Sibley looked at her in astonishment. "Who told you?" he asked. It had
only happened the night before, and it didn't seem possible she could
know.

He was quite right. It wasn't possible she could know, and she didn't
know. She only divined.

"I knew when you made the promise you couldn't keep it; that's why I
forgive you now," she added. "Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn't
to have let you make it."

The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John Sibley could
never have understood, for it was a part of the story of Crozier's life
reproduced--and with what a different ending!

CHAPTER XV. "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"

When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady
living-room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of
his conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by
the desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had
brought him nothing--nothing at all except a new manhood. But that he
did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this
new capital. He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic
sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account. He had
lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it--"nothing at all,
at all," as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where,
unknown to him, his wife awaited him. So abstracted was he, so disturbed
was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure
in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair
once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier,
"the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium," as Jesse Bulrush had
called him.

There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona's
eyes as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so
longingly re