rom the storms of life by wealth and comfort that these
piercing agonies which strike down to the uttermost depths so seldom
reach them.

Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange
apathy settled on him. He had once heard a man say, "I feel as though I
wanted to crawl into a hole and die." That was the way he felt now, for
to be beaten in the game which you have played like a man yourself and
have been fouled into an unchallenged defeat, without the voice of
the umpire, is a fate which has smothered the soul of better men than
Crozier.

Mona's voice stopped him. "Do not go, Shiel," she urged gently. "No, you
must not go--I want fair-play from you, if nothing else. You must play
the game with me. I want justice. I have to say some things I had no
chance to say before, and I want to hear some things I have a right to
hear. Indeed, you must play the game."

He drew himself up. Not to be a sportsman, not to play the game--to
accuse him of this would have brought him back from the edge of the
grave.

"I'm not fit to-day. Let it be to-morrow, Mona," was his hesitating
reply; but he did not leave the doorway.

She shook her head and made a swift little childlike gesture towards
him. "We are sure of to-day; we are not sure of to-morrow. One or the
other of us might not be here to-morrow. Let us do to-day the thing that
belongs to to-day."

That note struck home, for indeed the black spirit which whispers to men
in their most despairing hours to end it all had whispered to him.

"Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day," she had just said,
and, strange to say, there shot into his mind words that belonged to
the days when he went to church at Castlegarry and thought of a thousand
things other than prayer or praise, but yet heard with the acute ears of
the young, and remembered with the persistent memory of youth. "For the
night cometh when no man can work," were the words which came to him.
He shuddered slightly. Suppose that this indeed was the beginning of the
night! As she said, he must play the game--play it as Crozier of Lammis
would have played it.

He stepped inside the room. "Let it be to-day," he said.

"We may be interrupted here," she replied. Courage came to her. "Let us
talk in your own room," she added, and going over she opened the door of
it and walked in. The matured modesty of a lost five years did not cloak
her actions now. She was a woman fighting for happiness, and