“Have you relatives in this country?”

“None.  I am merely a tourist, seeking glimpses of the best of this vast continent of yours.”

“Did you make these sketches?”

“I did, from time to time; in fact, mine has been a sketching tour, and this book is one of several I have filled in America.”

With trembling fingers she untied the silk, lifted the sketch, and said in a voice which, despite her efforts, quivered: 

“I hope, sir, you will not consider me unwarrantably inquisitive, if I ask, where did you see this face?”

“Ah!  My monk of the mountains?  That is ‘Brother Luke’; looks like one of Il Frate’s wonderful heads, does he not?  I saw him—­let me see?  Egad!  Just exactly where it was, that is the rub!  It was far west, beyond Assiniboia; somewhere in Alberta I am sure.”

“Was it on British soil, or in the United States?”

“Certainly in British territory; and on one of the excursions I made from Calgary.  I think it was while hunting in the mountains between Alberta and British Columbia.  Let me see the sketch.  Yes—­10th of August; I was in that region until 1st of September.”

Beryl drew a deep breath of intense relief, as she reflected that foreign territory might bar pursuit; and leaning forward, she asked hesitatingly: 

“Have you any objection to telling me the circumstances under which you saw him; the situation in which you found him?”

“None whatever; but may I ask if you know him?  Is my sketch so good a portrait?”

“It is wonderfully like one I knew years ago; and of whom I desire to receive tidings.  My friend is a handsome man about twenty-four years of age.”

“I was camping out with a hunting party, and one day while they were away gunning, I went to sketch a bit of fir wood clinging to the side of a rocky gorge.  The day was hot, and I sat down to rest in the shadow of a stone ledge, that jutted over the cove where a spring bubbled from the crag, and made a ribbon of water.  Here is the place, on this sheet.  Over there, are the fir trees.  Very soon I heard a rich voice chanting a solemn strain from Palestrinas’ Miserere; the very music I had listened to in the Sistine Chapel, a few months before; and peeping from my sheltered nook, I saw a man clad in monkish garb stoop to drink from the spring.  He sat a while, with his arms clasped around his knees, and his profile was so perfect I seized my pencil and drew the outlines; but before I completed it, he suddenly fell upon his knees, and the intense anguish, remorse, contrition—­what not—­so changed the countenance, that while he prayed, I made rapidly a new sketch.  Then the most extraordinary thing happened.  He rose, and turning fully toward me, I saw that one-half of his face was nobly regular, classically perfect; while the other side was hideously distorted, deformed.  Absolutely he was ‘Hyperion and Satyr’ combined—­with one set of