Suddenly a great sigh burst from Derrick, and the moonlight broke up into tiny, dazzling fragments.  The darkness was full of them, alive with them.

“Fire-flies!” gasped Derrick, and began to cough, at first slowly, with pauses for breath, then quickly, spasmodically, convulsively.  For breath had finally failed him.

The arm behind him raised him with the steady strength of iron muscles, and a hand pressed his chest.  But the coughing did not cease.  It was the anguished strife of wounded Nature to assert her damaged authority; the wild, last effort to clutch and hold fast the elusive torch that, flickering in the midst of darkness, is called life—­the one priceless possession of our little mortal treasury.

And while he coughed and fought with the demon of suffocation Derrick was strongly aware of the eyes that watched him, burning like two brilliant blue points out of the darkness.  Wonderful eyes!  Steady, strong, unflinching.  The eyes of a friend—­a true friend—­not such an one as Carlyon—­Carlyon who had failed him.

A thick, unexplored darkness fell upon Derrick as he thought of Carlyon’s desertion; and he forgot at length to wonder at the strangeness of the night.

II

A BROKEN FRIENDSHIP

By and bye, when the light dawned in his eyes, Derrick began to dream of many strange things.

But he came back at last out of the shadows, weak and faint and weary.  And then he found that he was in hospital and had been there for weeks.

The discovery was rather staggering.  Somehow he had never quite rid himself of the impression that he was still lying on the great, rocky boulder where the Secret Service man had so magically scattered his enemies.  But as life and full consciousness returned to him he became aware that this had for weeks been no more than a fevered illusion.

When he was at length fairly out of danger he was dispatched southwards on the first stage of the homeward journey.

He sailed for Home with his resentment against Carlyon yet strong upon him.  He had no parents.  In his reckless young days, during the last three years of his minority, Carlyon had been this boy’s guardian.  But Derrick had been his own master for nearly four years, and the conscious joy of independence was yet dear to his heart.  He had no settled home of his own, but he had plenty of money.  And that, after all, was the essential thing.

He had been brought up with the daughter of a clergyman in whose home he had lived all his early life.  The two had grown up together in close companionship.  They had been comrades all their lives.

Only of recent years, at the end of an uneventful college career, had Derrick awakened to the astounding fact that Averil Eversley, his little playmate, was a maiden sweet and comely whom he wanted badly for his very own.  She was three years younger than himself, but she had always taken the lead in all their exploits.