avail were Wade’s good offices, his spiritual teaching, his eternal hope in the order of circumstances working out to good?  These beautiful characteristics of virtue were not so strong as the unchangeable passion of old Belllounds and the vicious depravity of his son.  Wade could not imagine himself a god, proving that the wages of sin was death.  Yet in his life he had often been an impassive destiny, meting out terrible consequences.  Here he was incalculably involved.  This was the cumulative end of years of mounting plots, tangled and woven into the web of his pain and his remorse and his ideal.  But hope was dying.  That was his strife-realization against the morbid clairvoyance of his mind.  He could not help Jack Belllounds to be a better man.  He could not inspire the old rancher to a forgetfulness of selfish and blinded aims.  He could not prove to Moore the truth of the reward that came from unflagging hope and unassailable virtue.  He could not save Columbine with his ideals.

The night wore on, and Wade plodded under the rustling aspens.  The insects ceased to hum, the owls to hoot, the wolves to mourn.  The shadows of the long spruces gradually merged into the darkness of night.  Above, infinitely high, burned the pale stars, wise and cold, aloof and indifferent, eyes of other worlds of mystery.

In those night hours something in Wade died, but his idealism, unquenchable and inexplicable, the very soul of the man, saw its justification and fulfilment in the distant future.

The gray of the dawn stole over the eastern range, and before its opaque gloom the blackness of night retreated, until valley and slope and grove were shrouded in spectral light, where all seemed unreal.

And with it the gray-gloomed giant of Wade’s mind, the morbid and brooding spell, had gained its long-encroaching ascendancy.  He had again found the man to whom he must tell his story.  Tragic and irrevocable decree!  It was his life that forced him, his crime, his remorse, his agony, his endless striving.  How true had been his steps!  They had led, by devious and tortuous paths, to the home of his daughter.

Wade crouched under the aspens, accepting this burden as a man being physically loaded with tremendous weights.  His shoulders bent to them.  His breast was sunken and labored.  All his muscles were cramped.  His blood flowed sluggishly.  His heart beat with slow, muffled throbs in his ears.  There was a creeping cold in his veins, ice in his marrow, and death in his soul.  The giant that had been shrouded in gray threw off his cloak, to stand revealed, black and terrible.  And it was he who spoke to Wade, in dreadful tones, like knells.  Bent Wade—­man of misery—­who could find no peace on earth—­whose presence unknit the tranquil lives of people and poisoned their blood and marked them for doom!  Wherever he wandered there followed the curse!  Always this had been so.  He was the harbinger of catastrophe.