Murder Point: A Tale of Keewatin
that which Granger proposed to do of set purpose—saved a life that he might take it. Did not that in some measure make amends? The problem was too complicated; it must work itself out in its own way. Yet, it would be a bitter irony if, after he had travelled a continent to avoid this deed, he should be forced to kill Spurling in the end—Spurling, who had come to him of his own accord. Still more burlesque would it be[59] if, after Spurling was at rest, he should be hanged in his stead.

[59]

But perhaps Mordaunt was not dead.

To rid himself of these morbid questionings, he would give his remoter memory the reins to-day, at whatever cost; it was pleasanter to remember bygone unpleasantness than to live with the ills which threatened his present life. He recollected how some one had once asked Carlyle, "Why does the Past always seem so much happier than the Present?" And Carlyle's stern reply, "Because the fear has gone out of it." How odd it seemed to him that he should be recalling Carlyle up there in Keewatin! Yet, because that answer was true, he took up the thread of his London life again, that so, with the drug of memory, he might lay to rest his immediate misfortunes. He was a little boy again in the old red house on Clapton Common. One by one he entered its homely rooms with their ancient furniture, quaint wall-paper, and general look of substantial comfort. Once more he leant out of the bow-window at the back and gazed beyond the hill, upon which the house was built, up which gardens climbed, divided by creeper-covered walls of crumbling brick, down to where at its foot the river ran through flats and marshes. Far away, a little to the right, old Woodford raised its head; to the left Chingford, as yet unmodernized, showed up; and straight ahead, at a distance of seven miles, the steeple of High Beech, in the kindly habitable forest of Epping, was in sight. This was the house in which he had first dreamed the dream by the glamour of which he had been led astray. His father had dreamed the same dream, and his grandfather before him; it seemed to be a part of the walls and masonry, so interwoven[60] was it with his memories of that house. It had been the first faery-story which he had ever listened to, and had been told to him for the most part in that back room with the bow-window, as he had sat on his grand-father's knee on winters' nights.

[60]

The first time that he had heard it he could not have been more than five, and his father was absent, so his grandfather said, pursuing the dream on the other side of 
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