Alton shook off his grasp.  “My friends!  I’ve done them harm enough, but you are right.  This thing isn’t finished yet.”

Seaforth smiled a little.  “That is a good deal better, Harry.  One wins at the last round now and then.”

Alton looked at him steadily.  “You don’t understand.  All that was worth winning has gone already—­but Hallam must fight.”

Seaforth saw the smouldering fire in the half-closed eyes, and the instinctive closing of the lean, hard fingers, and went back to his lair in the wet undergrowth contented.  Hallam had won hitherto, but he knew his comrade, and the struggle was not over yet.

CHAPTER XXX

SEAFORTH’S REINSTATEMENT

There is on the road between Vancouver and New Westminster a strip of primeval bush.  Beyond it the Fraser meadows stretch, open to wind and sun, westwards to the sea, but beneath the great black pines it is dim and shadowy, and Seaforth was glad of that as he stood leaning against a hemlock one sunny afternoon.  He would have found the task he had undertaken almost impossible in the glare of the white road that ran straight under the open sky, but the stillness of that green realm of shadow where all things were softened in the faint half-light had made it a trifle easier.  Also, the essence of the spring, which had come suddenly, was in the scent of pine and cedar, and it had given him courage, and set his pulses throbbing faster.  It is possible that the man did not realize all the influences that upheld him then, but something that sprang from the steaming earth and the life that was stirring in every towering pine reacted upon him, and he gathered hope when he saw the reflex of it in the eyes of his companion.

She sat a pace or two apart from him on a cedar-trunk, and a dusty bicycle rested against the farther end of it.  The dust was also thick upon her simple dress and the cotton gloves that lay in her hands.  Her fingers had tightened upon them, and there was a flush in her cheeks when for a moment she glanced at the man.  His face was a trifle colourless, but the girl looked aside again as she saw the tense anxiety in his eyes.

“And that is all,” he said, with a little tremble in his voice.  “You will think it is horribly too much?”

Nellie Townshead glanced away into the shadows of the bush, and there was pain and a trace of shrinking in her face, but it had vanished when she turned again, and her voice had a little imperious ring.

“And what made you tell me now?”

Seaforth spread his hands out with a little deprecatory gesture.  “I expected this.  The story I have told you should have shown you what I am—­and while I wanted to tell it earlier I was afraid.”

The colour was a trifle plainer in the cheeks of the girl, and her voice slightly more imperious still.

“That leaves the question unanswered.  I still want to know what gave you the courage now?”