It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the twentieth time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles into the wilderness.  There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a woman’s hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet perfume of hyacinth.  It was this odor that troubled him—­that had troubled him since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost homesick to-night.  It took him back to things—­to the days of not so very long ago when he had been a part of the life from which the letter came, and when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could wish.  In a retrospective flash there passed before him a vision of those days, when he, Mr. Philip Steele, son of a multimillionaire banker, was one of the favored few in the social life of a great city; when fashionable clubs opened their doors to him, and beautiful women smiled upon him, and when, among others, this girl of the hyacinth letter held out to him the tempting lure of her heart.  Her heart?  Or was it the tempting of his own wealth?  Steele laughed, and his strong white teeth gleamed in a half-contemptuous smile as he turned again toward the fire.

He sat down, with the letter still in his hands, and thought of some of those others whom he had known.  What had become of Jack Moody, he wondered—­the good old Jack of his college days, who had loved this girl of the hyacinth with the whole of his big, honest heart, but who hadn’t been given half a show because of his poverty?  And where was Whittemore, the young broker whose hopes had fallen with his own financial ruin; and Fordney, who would have cut off ten years of his life for her—­and half-a-dozen others he might name?

Her heart!  Steele laughed softly as he lifted the letter so that the sweet perfume of it came to him more strongly.  How she had tempted him for a time!  Almost—­that night of the Hawkins’ ball—­he had surrendered to her.  He half-closed his eyes, and as the logs crackled in the fireplace and the wind roared outside, he saw her again as he had seen her that night—­gloriously beautiful; memory of the witchery of her voice, her hair, her eyes firing his blood like strong wine.  And this beauty might have been for him, was still his, if he chose.  A word from out of the wilderness, a few lines that he might write to-night—­

With a sudden jerk Steele sat bolt upright.  One after another he crumpled the sheets of paper in his hand and tossed all but the signature page into the fire.  The last sheet he kept, studied it for a little—­as if her name were the answer to a problem—­then laid it aside.  For a few moments there remained still the haunting sweetness of the hyacinth.  When it was gone, he gave a last searching sniff, rose to his feet with a laugh in which there was some return of his old spirit, hid that final page of her letter in his traveling kit and proceeded to refill his pipe.