"My life is worthless to me and to every one else," he said, frankly, and as he uttered the words he was viewing his career in a flash-light of memory from its beginning to the present. "Yes, Miss Rowland, it is no good--absolutely no good. That's why I feel as I do for your brothers, and--I mean it--I'd give my life to-day to lift you out of this trouble and see you as I did that day in the store when you hired me." "_Hired_ you? Don't use that word," she suddenly cried out, and she put her hand on his arm in a gentle stroke of protest. "Mr. Brown, it seems to me--I don't know how to explain it, but it seems to me that I've known you for ages and ages. I can see that you are sad at times, and I know that you have suffered somehow, somewhere. That picture of the pretty child in your room--she is linked with your trouble, is she not?" "Indirectly," he admitted, not seeing her drift. "Yes, it was partly on her account--for her own future--that I left home." "I see, I see; and her mother?" Mary's voice had sunken almost to inaudibility; the cracking of the twigs under their feet all but drowned its sound. "Did you leave her with the child?" "Oh yes! They are inseparable," he answered. He felt that he was admitting too much, and he turned the subject to that of the lessening sunlight on a cliff to their left. He thought the dense clouds massing behind them indicated a high wind and a heavy downpour of rain. But his companion was not thinking of the state of the weather. "You will go back to them some day, of course," she persisted. Charles shuddered; she was probing a subject that he felt honor bound not to touch upon. She repeated her words, steadily fixing his eyes with her own. "No," he repeated, firmly, "I shall never go back, Miss Rowland--never in the world. My future home is here, anywhere, but never there again." "And you do not like to speak of your family? Is that it?" Mary went on, softly, sympathetically. "I can't--I haven't the moral right to speak of them now. That is all I can say. I'm dead to my past, Miss Rowland. I am blotting it out. Serving you in any capacity helps kill memories that ought to be dead. There are memories that reproach and torture one. I have my share of them." CHAPTER X For perhaps a mile they trudged along in silence. Presently Mary stopped and turned on him. "A drop of rain fell in my face," she said, looking up at the sky. His eyes followed hers. Along the brow of a mountain to the west clouds as black and thick as the smoke of pitch were massing. The tops of the trees in the near distance were swaying violently and the breeze had become cooler and was full of swift and contending currents. Little whirlwinds lifted the leaves at their feet and sent them sky-ward in shafts and spiral columns. More drops of rain fell. The brighter spot in the west was becoming cloud-veiled, and it was growing dark on all sides.