Seaforth smiled wryly.  “I was not the only fool,” he said.  “When I’d flung away everything a richer man came along.”

Alton was silent a space.  “Three thousand pounds,” he said, “is a good deal, even in the old country.”

“Yes,” said Seaforth wearily; “though it goes a very little way as I spent it, it is, and I’ve been paying it back, at first a few dollars at a time, ever since I came out to the Dominion.  You see, the old man paid off everything, though I know now money was very scarce with him then, and I’ve wondered sometimes how far it helped to break him.  He died soon after the crash came—­and the girls had nothing.”

“I think you told me your sisters were married now?”

“Yes,” said Seaforth, “Flora sent me back the last exchange somewhat indignantly, which was why I was able to take my share in the Consolidated.  Still, all that is a little outside the question, isn’t it?”

Alton smiled at his partner, and laid a sinewy hand on his shoulder.  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Charley,” he said.  “You were a young fool, but you have lived it down, and there’s the room there has always been for a good many more like you in the Dominion.  Look round in high places, and you’ll see them—­good men, and better than they might have been but for that little trip-up when they were young.  Yes, I’ve wondered where your dollars went to—­and I’m glad we have done so well now I know.  You can stand straight up, Charley, and face the world again.”

Seaforth laughed wryly.  “The trouble is that it isn’t the world I care about,” he said.

“No,” said Alton.  “Well, for one has to do the square thing, I think I’d chance telling somebody the story you told me—­though of course you’d have to put parts of it differently.”

Seaforth made a little gesture of despondency.  “I’m afraid I haven’t the courage, and—­with all that behind me——­”

“It—­is—­behind,” said Alton.  “And somehow I fancy it would only be fair to give the person it might concern the opportunity of hearing you.”

Seaforth appeared to check a groan.  “There are things that one can never quite rub out.  I was twenty-three then, and now when it is five years ago, and she is alone in that horrible city, I must keep silent still.  Harry, it’s almost unendurable, but, because I must tell that story, to speak now would be to throw my last chance away.”

Alton nodded with grave sympathy.  “Yes, I think you’re right, and you must wait.  Well, it’s time to turn in.  With the first of the daylight we’re going on again.”

He was asleep in another ten minutes, but Seaforth lay awake shivering under his clammy blankets most of the night, and rose aching when he heard his comrade’s voice through the patter of the rain in the misty darkness of the early morning.  They made four miles that day, and floundered waist-deep in water amidst the boulders during most of it.  The hillsides above them were steep and almost unclimbable, and no man could have driven a canoe upstream amidst the grinding ice-cake which cumbered the river, that was frozen still in its slower reaches.  There they found better travelling through the slush that covered the rotten ice, but those reaches were few and short, and they went back to the boulders when the swollen river burst its bonds again.