"It is from Myra," she explained; "and it's good news and bad. Do you remember what Dick was telling us the other evening about his drunken blacksmith?" "The fellow that went into the blast-choke after the dead man?" "Yes. He is down with mountain fever, and Myra says nothing but good nursing will save him. Dick has got his story out of him at last; he is Margaret Gannon's father." "Humph! what a little world this is! I suppose you will send Margaret right away?" "I shall go with her to-morrow morning. I'll tell Dick what you are going to do, and you can come when you are ready." The old man nodded acquiescence. "It'll be better for you to go along; she'll be all broke up. Want me to go and wire Dick?" "If you will. I should have asked the boy to wait, but he was gone before I had opened the envelope. Tell Dick to keep him alive at any cost, and that we'll be there to-morrow evening." When her father was gone, Constance sat down to piece out the discoveries, comforting and harrowing, of the foregone hour, and to set them over against each other in a field which was as yet too near to be retrospective. She tried to stand aside for herself, and to see and consider only those to whom her heart went out in loving compassion and sympathy; but it was inevitable that she should finally come to a re-reading of the letter taken from its hiding-place in the photograph frame. She dwelt upon it with a soft flush spreading slowly from neck to cheek, reading it twice and yet once again before she laid it in the little wall-pocket of a grate and touched a match to it. "For his sake and for mine," she said softly, as she watched it shrivel and blacken in the flame. "That is what I must do--burn my ships so that I can't go back." The charred wraith of the letter went up the chimney in the expiring gasp of the flame, and there was the sound of a familiar step in the corridor. She went quickly to open the door for the late visitor. It was Lansdale, come to say what must be said on the eve of parting, and to ask for his answer to a conditional plea made in a moment when the consumptive's optimism had carried him off his feet. CHAPTER XXXIII THE periods of the scene-shifter, in life as in life's mimicking on any stage, have fallen into disesteem. In any flight of fancy or plodding journey of fact these are flat countries to be traversed; interregnums which, however replete with incident for the actors themselves, are deemed alike unworthy of the playwright's outworking or the chronicler's recording. To the audience waiting beyond the footlights these are mere breathing spaces of music-hastened minutes standing for whatever lapses of days, weeks or months the story of the play involves; but for the scene-shifter they are gaps toil-filled, with fierce strivings and wrestlings and doughty compellings of the animate and inanimate perversities.