“I didn’t see the young woman; that wasn’t permitted, of course. But I suppose she knows all about it, and the thought makes me want to run amuck. In the whole dreary business there is only this single grain of comfort: I know who gave me away. And when I meet that man, God do so to me and more if I don’t send him where he belongs, and that without benefit of clergy. And you won’t say me nay when I tell you that his name is Harding. “I suppose you will want to know what I am going to do next. I don’t know, and that is God’s truth. The day after the thing happened I meant to vanish; but the chief was away and I couldn’t very well shut up the office and walk out. Since then the mill has been grinding until I don’t know what I want to do. Sometimes I am tempted to throw the whole thing overboard and go back to the hog wallow. It is about all I am fit for; and nobody cares--unless you do. “For pity’s sake write me a letter and brace me up if you can; I never needed it worse. The chief is still away; I can’t do another stroke of work till he comes back with the field books, and there isn’t a soul here that I can talk to. Consequently I’m going mad by inches. I suppose you have taken it for granted that I love the young woman, though I believe I haven’t said so in so many words. I do, and that is what racks me. If I go away, I give her up for good and all. If I stay I can’t get her. If I go to the devil again--but we won’t discuss that phase of it now. Write, and hold me to my word, if you love me.” This letter was mailed on the train Wednesday evening, and in the ordinary course of events it should have brought an answer by the Saturday. This Brant knew, and he set himself to wear out the interval with what constancy there was in him, doing nothing more irrational than the devoting of two of the evenings to aimless trampings in the Highlands, presumably in the unacknowledged hope that he might chance to see Dorothy at a distance. He did not see her, did not venture near enough to Altamont Terrace to stand any chance of seeing her, and when the Saturday passed without bringing a letter from Hobart, hope deferred gave birth to heaviness. “He is disgusted, I suppose, and I can’t blame him,” was his summing up of it when the postman had made his final round. “God in heaven, I wish the colonel would come back and give me my quittance! If I have to sit here and grill through many more days I shall be ripe for any devil’s sickle of them all!”