He started, a frown knitted his brows. For a moment he forgot what he was, where he was. That one word had conjured up the past, swept the fog from his brain. "Now, 381, what are you about?" He pulled himself together with an effort and rolled into a third-class compartment of the train with his fellow convicts. Radium! The word seemed to be burning into his brain. He said it aloud and received a sharp reprimand from the warder seated on his left by the window. There rose before his eyes a vision of Dartmoor, the disused tin-mine on his father’s farm; Robert Despard and he groping in the semi-blackness up to their knees in water.... Their discovery of pitch-blende—and Despard’s belief that, in that old worthless mine, there might lie hidden a fortune. A fortune for his father and his sister. His father whom he had ruined and shamed. And his sister! Again he blinked his eyes, driving away the mist before them. He found himself staring straight at the convict facing him. The man was talking to him. He saw the fingers of his handcuffed hands moving stealthily. He saw his half-closed eyes contracting and expanding. He answered: "Yes?" "Dartmoor! Princetown Prison," was the reply he received. Rupert lay back and closed his eyes. He might have guessed. It was the irony of fate. They were taking him home, back to his own land, to Dartmoor. To Princetown Prison. The great monument of granite that broods over the valley of the Dart, from whose barred windows, if a man could gaze, he would see Blackthorn Farm ... and the disused tin-mine with its hidden fortune waiting to be claimed. CHAPTER XIV. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. The words Sir Reginald had spoken to John Dale when he visited him at Charing Cross hospital after the trial, returned fairly frequently to his mind for many hours afterwards when he reached his own home on Dartmoor. "This thing might have happened to my boy." He recalled, too, the old yeoman’s reply when he reminded Sir Reginald that his son was a gentleman—and therefore could not do a mean thing. The Dales came of old yeoman stock; they could trace their family back as far, probably further, than the Crichtons. Old Dale was a gentleman right enough, and Crichton knew it would be impossible for him to do anything mean, much less dishonourable. Indeed, he had been the first to warn Sir Reginald that his daughter must never meet the baronet’s son again. Sir Reginald did not find it easy to believe that Jim had fallen in love with Marjorie Dale. He had to presume, like all parents, that he had been blind. His boy had never been in the habit of keeping anything from him.