You know what happened.  She left the table suddenly, overcome by shame and terror.  When I returned later, and told her that I could not find you, it was impossible to comfort her.  She lay in her bed crying all that night.  I am telling you all this, because to me my daughter is one of the two most precious things on earth, the sweetest and purest little girl that ever breathed.  I can not describe to you the effect upon her of the skull and the letter.  Forgive us—­forgive me.  Some day we may meet again

Sylvester Becker.

Like one in a dream Philip picked up the torn envelope.  Something dropped from it upon the table—­a tiny cluster of violets that had been pressed and dried between the pages of a book, and when he took them in his fingers, he found that their stems were tied with a single thread of golden hair!

Chapter IX.  Philip Takes Up The Trail

The letter—­the flowers—­that one shining golden hair, wound in a glistening thread about their shriveled stems, seemed for a short space to lift Philip Steele from out of the world he was in, to another in which his mind was only vaguely conscious, stunned by this letter that had come with the unexpectedness of a thunderbolt to change, in a single instant, every current of life in his body.  For a few moments he made no effort to grasp the individual significance of the letter, the flowers, the golden hair.  One thought filled his brain—­one great, overpowering truth, which excluded everything else—­and this was the realization that the woman he loved was not Colonel Becker’s wife.  She was free.  And for him—­Philip Steele—­there was hope—­hope—­Suddenly it dawned upon him what the flowers meant.  The colonel had written the letter, and Isobel had sent the faded violets, with their golden thread.  It was her message to him—­a message without words, and yet with a deeper meaning for him than words could have expressed.  In a flood there rushed back upon him all the old visions which he had fought against, and he saw her again in the glow of the campfire, and on the trail, glorious in her beauty, his ideal of all that a woman should be.

He rose to his feet and locked his door, fearing that some one might enter.  He wanted to be alone, to realize fully what had happened, to regain control of his emotions.  If Isobel Becker had merely written him a line or two, a note exculpating herself of what her father had already explained away, he would still have thought that a world lay between them.  But, in place of that, she had sent him the faded flowers, with their golden thread!

For many minutes he paced back and forth across his narrow room, and never had a room looked more like a prison cell to him than this one did now.  He was filled with but one impulse, and that was to return to Lac Bain, to humble himself at the feet of the woman he loved, and ask her forgiveness for the heinous thing he had done.  He wanted to tell her that he had driven Bucky Nome into outlawry, that he had fought for her, and run away himself—­because he loved her.  It was Sergeant Moody’s voice, vibrant with the rasping unpleasantness of a file, that jarred him back into his practical self.  He thrust the letter and the flowers into his breast pocket, and opened the door.