“You will be leaving now, I suppose?” Sir Charles asked. He was looking down, examining the broken pen in his hand. Mr. Collier stopped in his walk and considered. “Yes, I suppose they will want to get back,” he said. “I shall be sorry myself. And you? What will you do?” Sir Charles started slightly. He had not yet thought what he would do. His eyes wandered over the neglected work, which had accumulated on the desk before him. Only an hour before he had thought of it as petty and little, as something unworthy of his energy. Since that time what change had taken place in him? For him everything had changed, he answered, but in him there had been no change; and if this thing which the girl had brought into his life had meant the best in life, it must always mean that. She had been an inspiration; she must remain his spring of action. Was he a slave, he asked himself, that he should rebel? Was he a boy, that he could turn his love to aught but the best account? He must remember her not as the woman who had crushed his spirit, but as she who had helped him, who had lifted him up to something better and finer. He would make sacrifice in her name; it would be in her name that he would rise to high places and accomplish much good. She would not know this, but he would know. He rose and brushed the papers away from him with an impatient sweep of the hand. “I shall follow out the plan of which I spoke at dinner,” he answered. “I shall resign here, and return home and enter Parliament.” Mr. Collier laughed admiringly. “I love the way you English take your share of public life,” he said, “the way you spend yourselves for your country, and give your brains, your lives, everything you have--all for the empire.” Through the open window Sir Charles saw Miss Cameron half hidden by the vines of the veranda. The moonlight falling about her transformed her into a figure which was ideal, mysterious, and elusive, like a woman in a dream. He shook his head wearily. “For the empire?” he asked. THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER A SKETCH CONTAINING THREE POINTS OF VIEW What the Poet Laureate wrote. “There are girls in the Gold Reef City There are mothers and children too! And they cry ‘Hurry up for pity!’ So what can a brave man do? “I suppose we were wrong, were mad men, Still I think at the Judgment Day, When God sifts the good from the bad men, There’ll be something more to say.” What more the Lord Chief Justice found to say. “In this case we know the immediate consequence of your crime. It has been the loss of human life, it has been the disturbance of public peace, it has been the creation of a certain sense of distrust of public professions and of public faith.... The sentence of this Court therefore is that, as to you, Leander Starr Jameson, you be confined for a period of fifteen months without hard labor; that you, Sir John Willoughby, have ten months’ imprisonment; and that you, etc., etc.”