THE WOMAN ... WHOSE HANDS ARE AS BANDS THE lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley, and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling, floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories, and he rose and relighted his cigar. “That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have set my hand.” “‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.” “I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is there, all the same.” The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was only to clinch insistence with iteration. “I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will; and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp----” “I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall--a drop from heaven to hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall; he climbs down into the pit a step at a time--and there are more steps behind me than I can ever retrace.” “But you can’t go on indefinitely,” insisted the other. The fallen one shook his head. “That is a true word. But there is only one adequate ending to such a fiasco of a life as mine.” “And that?” “Is a forty-five calibre bullet, well aimed.” “Bah! That is a coward’s alternative, and if you haven’t altogether parted company with the George Brant I used to know, we needn’t consider it. Why don’t you turn over a clean leaf and cut the whole despicable business?” Brant sat down on the porch step and clasped his hands over his knee. Friendship has its key wherewith to unlock any door of confidence, but from disuse the lock was rusted and it yielded reluctantly. “I have half a mind to let the game wait while I tell you,” he said at length. “It isn’t a pleasant tale, and if you are disgusted you can call me down.” “Never mind about that; go on.” “I’ll have to go back a bit first--back to the old college days. Do you remember the old woman who lived on the flat below the campus? the one who used to smuggle liquor and other contraband into the dormitories when she came to scrub?” “Mother Harding? Yes.”