the man again; neither did he see Ralph, although he made good, so far as in him lay, his fiction of an engagement at the Touraine. But Ralph could not come; and Winter had lunched, instead, with an old friend at his club, and had watched, through a stately Georgian window, the shifting greenery of the Common in an east wind.

[6]

All through the luncheon the soldier’s mind kept swerving from the talk in hand to Cary Mercer’s face. Yet he never expected to see it again. Three years later he did see it; and this second encounter, of which, by the way, Mercer was unconscious, was the beginning of an absorbing chapter in his life. A short space of time that chapter occupied; yet into it crowded mystery, peril, a wonderful and awful spectacle, the keenest happiness and the cruelest anxiety. Let his days be ever so many, the series of events which followed Mercer’s reappearance will not be blurred by succeeding experiences; their vivid and haunting pictures will burn through commoner and later happenings as an electric torch flares through layers of mist.

Nothing, however, could promise adventure less than the dull and chilly late March evening[7] when the chapter began. Nor could any one be less on the lookout for adventure, or even interest, than was Rupert Winter. In truth, he was listless and depressed.

[7]

When he alighted from his cab in the great court of the Rock Island Station he found Haley, his old orderly, with a hand on the door-hasp. Haley’s military stoicism of demeanor could not quite conceal a certain agitation—at least not from the colonel’s shrewd eye, used to catch the moods of his soldiers. He strangled a kind of sigh. “Doesn’t like it much more than I,” thought Rupert Winter. “This is mighty kind of you, Haley,” he said.

“Yes, sor,” answered Haley, saluting. The colonel grinned feebly. Haley, busy repelling a youthful porter, did not notice the grin; he strode ahead with the colonel’s world-scarred hand-luggage, found an empty settee beside one of the square-tiled columns of the waiting-room and disposed his burden on the iron-railed seat next the corner one, which he reserved for the colonel.

“The train ain’t in yet, Colonel,” said he. “I’ll be telling you—”

“No, Haley,” interrupted the colonel, whose lip twitched a little; and he looked aside; “best say[8] good-by now; don’t wait. The fact is, I’m thinking of too many things you and I have gone through 

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