and exploration company in which Ambrose had a considerable interest. "Hullo, Royle! You dining with anybody? No. Well, come and share this table with me. I am alone too." Ambrose ordered his dinner. There was a silence for a sat down and minute as the waiter brought the wine; and in that silence a conflict raged fiercely within the soul of Ambrose Royle. Then he spoke suddenly. "How have you been?" said his friend. "You are looking a little off colour; not quite up to your usual form, eh?" "Oh, I am all right," answered Ambrose. "You seem a bit overdone yourself, though. Hard work with the Equatorial? Going strong there, I hope." "We are doing well enough. But I have had a lot of worry. For one thing, we want a secretary, and it's the deuce of a trouble to find him, though we are offering eight hundred a-year." "I should have thought you would have applications in by the shoal." "So we have; but curiously enough we haven't succeeded in spotting the man we want. You see, it is not quite the ordinary kind of secretary we require, but a fellow who can go out from time to time to look after the properties, report to us, and keep things ship "Look here, Macgregor; I believe I know the very man you are after. I am a pretty large shareholder in the company myself, you recollect, so I suppose my recommendation will carry a little weight." if "Of course. In any case, your friend has the qualifications I mentioned we shall be delighted to hear from him. He will be able to take up a couple of thousand of our shares, I suppose?" "Is that necessary Absolutely. The last chap bolted with the cash-box when we sent him out, and the shareholders kicked up such a row about our carelessness that the board has insisted on proper security this time. If we are to take your man he must find that amount." "He will be able to manage it," said Ambrose. There was a letter for Mrs Egerton the next morning which she read with interest : "MY DEAR MAUD,-After I left you yesterday I met the IX. director of an African Land Company in which I am interested. They are looking for a secretary, a gentleman who knows something about mines and can manage natives. The salary is £800 a-year. occurred to me that the post might suit your friend, Mr Fennell; and if he cares for it I think he can have it. I do not know his address, so will ask you to mention this matter to him. The secretary will be required to hold two thousand shares in the company. I am increasing my interest by that number, and perhaps Mr F. would not object to taking them up for me, as I do not care to have any more shares in my own name. If he will be good enough to call upon me here I will give him further particulars and a letter of introduction. He had better come at once, as I am going abroad in a few days and may not be in town (or able to give myself the pleasure of seeing you again) for some months.Always yours, "AMBROSE ROYLE. Roderick will take you out fishing, if you like." Ambrose declined. "What's the good?" he thought; "she doesn't really want me. She will be thinking all the time of the long-legged fellow whom she will now be able to marry-thanks to me. I will tell her I can't come.' But the next day he changed his mind. He got up un accountably obsessed by the desire to see her again. After all, why not? It could do no harm, since he now quite understood his real position in her eyes, to enjoy a few days of her society. Then he would go to the South for the winter, and very likely she would be married before he saw her again. He told his servant to pack a portmanteau, sent a telegram to the hotel at Argle's Bay, and was able to catch a morning train to the north. As he settled down in his first-class carriage the guard opened the door to induct another traveller, a big man with a drooping red moustache. "A corner seat here, sir," said the official; "will this do for you?" "I guess not," said the man with the red moustache; "I want to smoke." They passed to the next compartment, leaving Ambrose Royle bewildered. Surely he had seen this man before? The voice, the face, the moustache, seemed strangely familiar. Yet he could not remember who their owner was, or where he had met him. “İ seem to know him quite well, somehow," he thought; "but I I suppose it's a mistake-some ing shot suddenly into his trick of memory or association, mind, and brought him to his no doubt. Odd, though. feet with a start. Of course! could have sworn I had heard He remembered the red hair, that voice not very long ago." the hanging moustache, the glaring bloodshot eyes, the rough voice with the Western rasp. They belonged to the man of his dream-of the vision he had had in Maud Egerton's flat, wherein Maud herself was so much concerned. The afternoon of the late summer day was waning when Royle arrived at the Argle's Bay Hotel and inquired for Mrs Egerton and her son. The young gentleman was seafishing, he was told; the lady had gone out with her sketchbook and would probably be back before long. Ambrose sat down in the lounge and ordered some tea and a sandwich, for he had missed his lunch in the train. At the other end of the hall was the hotel bureau; looking through the open door, he noticed a tall man in low-toned earnest converse with the clerk at the counter. The man's back was towards him; presently he turned and strode rapidly out of the house, and Ambrose recognised his red-haired friend of the terminus platform. "That chap again!" he muttered. "Now where the deuce have I seen him?" It annoyed him for a moment, as it annoys all of us when we are feeling about for a memory that will not allow itself to be seized. But in such cases the sub-conscious mind is usually at work, and brings the idea to the plane of perception in due course. Ambrose went up to look at his rooms, and then came down again, and drank his tea and began to glance idly at the columns of a local newspaper. As he did so, the recognition he had been seek He went hastily across to the office. "That gentleman, who was here just now, the tall one with red hair," he said to the clerk, "who is he? Do you know anything about him?" "He is an American; but he is not staying in the hotel. He only came in to ask if he could see Mrs Egerton." It seemed to Royle as if he had expected the answer, he was so little surprised at it. "Did he say he would call again when she returned?" he asked the clerk. "I said she was out. He wanted to know which way she had gone, and when I told him he said he would stroll along and meet her. She was expecting him and would like him to see her at once.' "Ah! Will you tell me also how I can find her quickly? I know the lady, too,—and this gentleman." "I believe she has gone along the Cliff Walk. Turn to the left just above the village and you will see the path before you. Go straight on and you will get to a little open place in the cliff where Mrs Egerton When you often sketches. come to where the path divides Ambrose snatched up his hat and stick and hurried out. He passed through the village and found himself upon the path that ran along the face of the great sloping grass-grown cliff. He had no very definite thought in his mind; but some dim remembrance of his dream was before him, and vaguely he felt that the visit of the red-haired man boded ill to Maud. He walked fast, almost running at times, getting hot and flurried with the exertion, for the afternoon was warm and he was in no condition for violent exercise. In his anxiety he forgot the clerk's direction, and when he came to the spot where the path divided he took the upper road instead of the lower. This lower path, a mere thread in the tangle of weeds and hummocky turf, was a cul-de-sac that led only to a tiny shelf or plateau notched in a curve of the cliff. To this lonely resting-place, hung as it were between sky and sea, had Maud come to finish a watercolour sketch. She sat on a fallen log at the roots of a jutting larch-tree, with her box of paints beside her. The falling afternoon sun poured its sluices of light from behind a filmy veil of sea-mist and drifting cloud, and Maud was bending over her sketching block wholly absorbed in the endeavour to reproduce the glimmering levels of purple and azure that stretched away before her. The painter herself made a charming picture. She had thrown her hat on the ground, and the tendrils of her golden hair, ruffled by the caressing sea - wind, strayed lightly over her forehead; a little smile, the smile of the craftsman pleased with his work, curved her pretty lips and lightened the grave intentness of her eyes. So wrapped was she in her task that she did not notice the heavy tread crunching the dried heather until it paused a few feet from her. Her eyes were still preoccupied as she looked up and saw, without recognising at first, the tall man who was gazing at her with a stare of gloating intensity, until he spoke. "I guess you look pretty comfortable, Mrs Egerton, he said. The voice and the familiar Western accent brought Maud swiftly down from the dreamland of art and nature. The peaceful seascape faded away, and she felt herself once more among the rugged hills of the mining country and the rugged beings she had known there. The scene in the Colorado court-house came back to her mind, and the last time she had looked upon the man who stood before her. She remembered him well enough, and had not forgotten the threats with which he had received his punishment. The smile died out of her face; but she laid down her sketch - book and brush with a hand that did not tremble, and quietly rose to her feet. "Well, you didn't calculate to see me here," the red-haired man went on. "But I told you I should find you out, and I have found you. You have not forgotten me, I reckon." "No," said Maud calmly; "I have not forgotten you, Jim Watherston. What do you want with me?" "Want? I want what I told you I should want, six years ago. I want my revenge, and I am going to take it, here and now." "That is absurd. You were punished for the crime you committed. It was no fault of mine. I told the truth when I was asked, that was all. There was nothing else I could do or ought to have done." "Yes; and sent me to hell to hell, I say. Do you know what it is to a man like me to pass five eternal years a prisoner, a slave, shut out from the light of day? I never slept through a night in those years. It was hell, I tell you, hell and torment." "I am very sorry," said Maud; "but it is over now. Forget it, and do the best with your life, and try to be happy. "Happy! There will be no happiness for me till I done the one thing I been thinking about all the time. Every night when I lay tossing on my plank - bed in my dogkennel, I said to myself, 'Keep alive, Jim Watherston; keep alive. You got to come out of this and find that woman and kill her!' Well, I kept alive, and I am going to kill you-now. See here!" With his left hand he seized Maud roughly by the arm; his right plunged into a hip-pocket and drew forth a heavy revolver. Maud was seriously alarmed; the eyes that glared into hers had the gleam of insanity. She was alone and defenceless with this man, who had apparently driven himself mad by brooding upon his imagined wrongs: an armed and homicidal maniac. But she stood quite quietly, thinking hard, and resolved not to lose what chance of escape there might be. "Jim Watherston," she said, "I have told you I am sorry. Perhaps if I had known what provocation you had had I might not have spoken. But what good will you do by killing me? Remember your own life will pay the penalty. We are not in Colorado now. If you commit a murder in this country, it will not be five years in the Penitentiary; you will be hanged for it, you know. Come all that business happened long ago, and we are both growing older. Let us make the best we can of the years left to both of us. It would be foolish for you to put yourself in danger of death; and don't you think it would be a pity for the sake of that old quarrel to kill a woman-like me?" Her heart was beating fast, but she managed to smile, and it was a smile few men could resist. Even mad Jim Watherston did not quite ignore its seduction. But he only glared at her with his flaming eyes, and said "You are a fine woman, Mrs |