subtleties, which played on Anderson's fresh senses like the breeze on young leaves-whither had he been drifting ?-to the brink of what precipice had he brought himself, unknowing?

He stood there indefinitely, among the charred tree-trunks that bordered the line, his arms folded, looking straight before him, motionless.

Supposing to-day had been yesterday, need he-together with this sting of passion-have felt also this impotent and angry despair? Before his eyes had seen that figure lying on the straw of Mrs. Ginnell's outhouse, could he ever have dreamed it possible that Elizabeth Merton should marry him?

Yes! He thought, trembling from head to foot, of that expression in her eyes he had seen that very afternoon. Again and again he had checked his feeling by the harsh reminder of her social advantages. But, at this moment of crisis, the man in him stood. up, confident and rebellious. He knew himself sound, intellectually and morally. There was a career before him, to which a cool and reasonable ambition looked forward without any paralysing doubts. In this growing Canada, measuring himself against the other men of the moment, he calmly foresaw his own growing place. As to money, he would make it; he was in process of making it, honourably and sufficiently.

He was well aware indeed that in the case of many women sprung from the English governing class, the ties that bind them to their own world, its traditions, and its outlook, are so strong that to try and break them would be merely to invite disaster. But then from such women his own pride-his pride in his country-would have warned his passion. It was to Elizabeth's lovely sympathy, her generous detachment, her free kindling mind-that his life had gone out. She would, surely, never be deterred from marrying a Canadian-if he pleased her-because it would cut her off from London and Paris, and all the ripe antiquities and traditions of English or European life? Even in the sparsely peopled North-West, with which his own future was bound up, how many English women are there-fresh, some of them, from luxurious and fastidious homes-on ranches, on prairie farms, in the Okanagan valley! This North-West is no longer a wilderness!' he proudly thought; 'it is no longer a leap in the dark to bring a woman of delicate nurture and cultivation to the prairies.' So, only a few hours before, he might have flattered the tyranny of longing and desire which had taken hold upon him.

6

But now! All his life seemed besmirched. His passion had been no sooner born than, like a wounded bird, it fluttered to the ground. Bring upon such a woman as Elizabeth Merton the most distant responsibility for such a being as he had left behind him in the log-hut at Laggan? Link her life in however remote a fashion with that life? Treachery and sacrilege, indeed! No need for Delaine to tell him that! His father as a grim memory of the past-that Lady Merton knew. His own origins-his own story as to that she had nothing to discover. But the man who might have dared to love her, up to that moment in the hut, was now a slave, bound to a corpse

Finis!

And then as the anguish of this thought swept through him, and by a natural transmission of ideas, there rose in Anderson the sore and sudden memory of old, unhappy things, of the tender voices and faces of his first youth. The ugly vision of his degraded father had brought back upon him, through a thousand channels of association, the recollection of his mother. He saw her nowthe worn, roughened face, the sweet swimming eyes; he felt her arms round him, the tears of her long agony on his face. She had endured!-he too must endure. Close, close !-he pressed her to his heart. As the radiant image of Elizabeth vanished from him in the darkness, his mother-broken, despairing, murdered in her youth-came to him and strengthened him. Let him do his duty to this poor outcast, as she would have done it—and put high thoughts from him.

He tore himself resolutely from his trance of thought, and began to walk back along the line. All the same, he would go up to Lake Louise, as he had promised, on the following morning. As far as his own intention was concerned, he would not cease to look after Lady Merton and her brother; Philip Gaddesden would soon have to be moved, and he meant to escort them to Vancouver.

Sounds approached, from the distance the 'freight,' with the doctor, climbing the steep pass. He stepped on briskly to a signalman's cabin and made arrangements to stop the train.

It was towards midnight when he and the doctor emerged from the Ginnells' cabin.

'Oh, I daresay we'll heal those cuts,' said the doctor. 'I've told Mrs. Ginnell what to do; but the old fellow's in a pretty cranky state. I doubt whether he'll trouble the world very long.'

Anderson started. With his eyes on the ground and his hands in his pockets, he inquired the reason for this opinion.

'Arteries!-first and foremost. It's a wonder they've held out so long, and then-a score of other things. What can you expect? The speaker went into some details, discussing the case with gusto. A miner from Nevada? Queer hells often, those mining camps, whether on the Canadian or the American side of the border. 'You were acquainted with his family ?—Canadian, to begin with, I understand?

'Yes. He applied to me for help. Did he tell you much about himself?"

'No. He boasted a lot about some mine in the Comstock district which is to make his fortune, if he can raise the money to buy it up. If he can raise fifteen thousand dollars, he says, he wouldn't care to call Rockefeller his uncle!'

'That's what he wants, is it?' said Anderson, absently, 'fifteen thousand dollars?'

'Apparently. Wish he may get it!' laughed the doctor. Well, keep him from drink, if you can. But I doubt if you'll cheat the undertaker very long. Good-night. There'll be a train along soon that'll pick me up.'

Anderson went back into the cabin, found that his father had dropped asleep, left money and directions with Mrs. Ginnell, and then returned to his own lodgings.

He sat down to write to Delaine. It was clear that, so far, that gentleman and Mrs. Ginnell were the only other participants in the secret of McEwen's identity. The old man had not revealed himself to the doctor. Did that mean that-in spite of his first reckless interview with the Englishman-he had still some notion of a bargain with his son, on the basis of the fifteen thousand dollars?

Possibly. But that son had still to determine his own line of action. When at last he began to write, he wrote steadily and without a pause. Nor was the letter long.

(To be continued.)

MAKING GOOD.

BY A. E. W. MASON.

THERE were four of them. They were sitting on the terrace of an old Tudor house in one of the Home Counties-Colonel Faraday who had done his work, young Arthur Pynes who was sailing out to-morrow to begin his, and two other men of no importance. It was six o'clock in the evening, and the sun was rather low in their faces. Half a dozen steps led down from the terrace to a broad lawn which, flanked upon the one side by a grey stone wall and upon the other by a high grove of elms, ran out smooth and level and green to a low parapet. Beyond the parapet a chain of still ponds, each one of them a platter of gold, linked the lawn to a field of deep grass ready for the scythe. But of the lawn and of the pools three of the four men took no heed, and the fourth was not given a chance.

'There's a ritual, of course?' said Arthur Pynes.

He was questioning the Colonel about the secret clubs of West Africa. To-morrow at this hour he would be steaming down the Mersey on his way to the Gold Coast, and he was eager for knowledge. Colonel Faraday drew down the peak of his cap to shade his eyes from the sun, and spoke wearily of Ikun and Ukuku and Poorah, and how Egbo could go from Calabar and meet with respect in Okyon but with none in Cameroon. He spoke resentfully as well as wearily. For the peace of the garden had entered into his soulhe was so lately back from Sierra Leone-and he did not wish to lose it as he surely would, if the talk went on upon these lines. Arthur Pynes, however, was pitiless.

'You haven't mentioned the Leopard Society,' he said. 'No,' replied Colonel Faraday,' I haven't.'

There was just a shade of difference in his voice. He moved too in his chair sharply. Pynes was encouraged.

?'

'Did you ever come across it, Colonel ? 'Yes,' said Faraday reluctantly, 'I did. I came across the Human Leopards once. There's murder in their ritual.' Upon that he stopped. peace of the garden had

But he had already said too much. The gone from him. Its very aspect was

changing before his eyes as he looked out under the peak of his cap. The grove of elms thickened to a twilit forest of cotton trees slung with monstrous orchids, the lawn became a batter of black mud, the chain of pools a river.

'And,' he added slowly, 'I believe they do something with fat.'

The phrase startled the Colonel's audience. It had a suggestion of sinister and odious things. There was a momentary feeling of discomfort in each one of them. Moreover, Faraday had spoken with finality. He wished for no more questions; that was evident. But if they had been put to him, he would hardly have answered them. A story which in the course of years had faded in his recollections was growing slowly into vividness again, resuming its details, clothing itself with commencement, development, and conclusion. And then a sentence spoken by one of his companions, a sentence accidentally and strangely apposite, pierced through the wall which remembrance had built about him and caught his attention. He answered it.

'No,' he said. Men have relapsed into barbarism after they have been educated out of it. There have been cases no doubt. But this man didn't. That explanation would not account for him. No, what he did was quite deliberate.'

The three men looked at Colonel Faraday, surprised by his interruption, and wondering who 'this man' might be. But they had not to wait. For now of his own accord he told his story. It follows here as he told it.

It happened some years ago in the Imperi country at the back of Freetown in Sierra Leone. I had a district there. I was judge, policeman, public prosecutor, and counsel for the defence all in one. I was Minister for all the Departments. I was King. And I had twenty soldiers of the tribe to maintain my authority. I was on a tour of inspection, and I stopped fairly early one afternoon at a big village in a clearing of the forest. I had no particular business at that village, and I should really have liked to go forward for another six miles to a better camping ground. But I could not. I was too late. It was perfectly well known that at a bend in the forest, two miles from the clearing, the ghost of a spear was in the habit of hurtling to and fro across the path after three o'clock in the afternoon, and anyone who was hit by it was sure to die very painfully and quickly.