“There are still good women in the world!” he muttered, “and, God bless you, you have taught me this, Justine!” Drawing her picture from his bosom, he gazed fondly at the face of the gentle-hearted daughter of the Alps. A vain and passionate regret racked his bosom--the last struggle of his wavering soul! “Shall I turn back?” he doubtfully cried. And then in the rush of his onward course, a dull hopeless feeling came over him. “Kismet!” he cried. “It is too late now. If they had only trusted me! If they had told me all and given my fighting soul a chance to redeem the lost promise once written on my brow. I have played a man’s part before! I might, perhaps, have won this girl’s gratitude and earned Justine’s love to be a shield and a buckler to me. But--” his head, overweaned with care, drooped down, and in the company of strange visions and and dreams of ominous import, the hunted soldier of fortune forgot alike the echoing voice of his better angel, and lost from view, the shadowy faces of both the woman who had lured him to a living death, and the tender-hearted one whose heart was glowing at Lausanne in all the fervor of her unrequited devotion. Over Alan Hawke, sleeping there, as he was swiftly borne away, hovered, in sad regret, his good angel, with sorrowing eyes, for the stern, self-accusing man had not sought, in the last hours of this sorrow, even the poor consolation that his life had been wrecked to feed the fires of vanity burning in the jaded heart of the beautiful Faustine, whose cold desertion had sold his youth to shame! Twenty-four hours later Major Alan Hawke was again a stormy petrel on Life’s trackless ocean. The cold politeness of Captain Anson Anstruther at the brief interview at the Junior United Service Club in London at once decided the wanderer to make for India as soon as his “pressing engagements” would allow. There was no seeming menace, however, in Anstruther’s wearied air of perfunctory courtesy. “The whole affair being officially dropped, Major Hawke,” said Anstruther, “I only ask for your personal receipt for my individual check. You will observe that this eleven hundred pounds is not in any way government funds. And, on behalf of the Viceroy himself, I thank you for your energy shown in the inquiry, which is now permanently abandoned.” To Major Hawke’s murmured request, Anstruther replied: “Certainly! Drive around to Grindlay’s in Parliament Street with me and they will at once give you notes or their own circular check for this money.” In ten minutes, when Hawke had lightly announced his intention to return to India, the Captain observed: “I may not meet you for some years. If the Viceroy returns to England, my promotion will probably carry me with his Embassy to Paris as Major and Military Attache.” And then they parted as mere casual acquaintances. “Damn his cool impertinence,” mused Alan Hawke, as he caught a passing cab, after telegraphing his greetings and intended departure to Justine Delande.