half-burned fragments, snatching them back as priceless treasures that they might be guarded as if they held in them the issues of life and death!

The sound of horses without, and laughing voices on the stairs, caused her suddenly to wake from her reverie. The little gold ring was swiftly slipped from her finger, the door was unlocked, and with unruffled composure she welcomed her sisters and their friends, come to rout her out of her den. "Come, you dear old hermit," they cried, "leave your little green den and come down to lunch. It is a sin to be in on such a day, and if we hurry we can get in a good three hours' skating this afternoon."

On the window-sill, the robin finished his meal; in the quiet room the clock ticked with unwonted noise; the last log fell and crumbled, and up the wide chimney one more frail fragment of black paper floated skyward.

CHAPTER II

A CRY IN THE NIGHT

T had been a blazing hot day. Humanity was

IT

baked in the sun and stifled in the shade. The unlovely town had been a most uninviting place, while in the sweltering country everything was dust-covered and parched from lack of the rain that had so long been withheld from thirsty earth and brazen heavens. In the hotel lobby, loungers had dozed and grumbled according to their temperament; in the dining-room, flies had buzzed and annoyed the unfortunate diners, who had lost in that stale and stuffy place what little appetite they might have had. Now evening had come, and with it no relief. Black thunder clouds on the horizon promised better things later on, but at the moment the oppression of the atmosphere and the sticky dampness of his weary body made Jack Morris turn from the lower regions of that miserable caravansary and seek out the bath-room where at least for a few moments

he could relieve his discomfort in a deep, cold plunge. The drowsy and disgusted guests seemed to have cast off some of their lethargy, for the bar was crowded and the noise grew lively and more hilarious with the clinking of glasses and the imbibing of their rather fiery contents. The bustle of arrivals from the last train threw a fictitious air of activity and business into the office, and it seemed to Jack as he looked back from the stairs (the hotel boasted no elevator) that some electric current had passed through the place, galvanising it into spasmodic life.

"Thank goodness, I'll be out of this hole by five A.M.," he muttered as he turned to his room and cast himself upon a very uninviting bed in the hope that some measure of oblivion might come to him through the hours of night. Such a hope, however, was not to be realised. His room was situated just above the bar, and the constant noise of a banging screen-door, as fresh guests arrived or departed, became irritating to his nerves. The sound of boisterous joke and laughter increased and broke jarringly upon his reverie, when he managed for a moment to forget the present, in the weaving of dreams for the future.

He had written a day or two since a letter to Muriel that was, to him at least, very momentous.

He thought that by now it must be in her hands and he tried to picture her reading it. Sometimes he saw her out on the breeze-swept cliffs, sometimes in the quiet of her little den, sometimes amid her dearly loved roses, and in each place her earnest eyes were bent over the fluttering sheets of his letter. At times the vision was so clear he could almost call her to look up at him, and then a shout of laughter, or the sound of breaking glass, would rudely call him back, and he would turn restlessly upon the hard and creaking bed, with a movement of unutterable disgust and impatience.

The low muttering of thunder drew nearer. Jack's window shade flapped uneasily, as the wind, that foreruns the storm, rose around the house, banging loose shutters, and raising clouds of dust and rubbish in its warning wake. Then someone stumbled against his door in a somewhat unsteady progress down the corridor. Evidently the bar was getting in its work. The drought of the past dry season had made travellers thirsty and dusty, and the electric tension in the atmosphere tended also to drive many to stimulants for relief. Jack tossed again more impatiently.

Always absolutely temperate and clean of life himself, he could not understand or tolerate the drinking man. He had no patience with those

His

who, to his thinking, were such fools as to befog their senses and become a nuisance to others. temper had been ruffled that very evening, on the way up-stairs, by a half-tipsy old fellow who blocked his way and clapped him on the back while shouting tipsily: "Come and have a drink, my boy. I'se a very good friend of yours. Don't remember name, no matter, I 'se a jolly old dog. Come and take a drink.'

Jack, resenting the familiarity, had disclaimed the acquaintance and had somewhat roughly shaken the old party off, when he tried to embrace him and weep on his shoulder over the rebuff. There had been a roar of laughter at his expense from the hotel lobby, whence the scene had been witnessed, and he had felt himself affronted and soiled by the poor sot whom the other men called by name and seemed to know well, but who was to him only a disgusting manifestation of a weakness in a fool member of the human family.

Now the storm, which had so long threatened, broke with pent-up fury and let loose upon the shuddering earth the vials of its wrath. Flash after flash of lightning, crash after crash of thunder, shook and reverberated through the house. The vivid glare was so constant and intense that every