The stalwart figure standing on the threshold was good to see. The fever that had followed that terrible night of physical exhaustion had been worsted at last by Jubilee Jim's homely medicaments and the balm of peace and sleep. There had been days when Harry had been perilously near the Great Adventure, but assiduous nursing and a splendid native constitution had in the end conquered. The pure air of the balsam forest and the comfort of the solitude had at length had their way with him. The flesh had come back to the wasted frame, the old brightness to the eye, and the flush of perfect health to the skin. Now, with his curling hair and his crisp dark beard, trimmed as of old, he was again the Harry Sevier of a year before--save that back of the eyes was a steady something, a deep conscious strength that had come to him from those bitter prison months when his soul had been tried in a fiery furnace of pain. Sevier dropped his hand with a long sigh of relief, for at a turn in the path, the dark blotch had resolved itself into the figure of a man, followed by a great dog harnessed to a little cart. "It's Jube!" he said aloud. "He's made the trip safely, and he's got the things!" This journey had been the outcome of much thought on Harry's part. Lying there in the long weeks of convalescence, his mind had been busy with the problem of the future. What to do? He could not stay forever there on the mountain, a lonely hermit. Somewhere, he must take up life again. When he had beguiled those dark prison moods with thoughts of freedom, his imagination had pictured flight to some distant country where, under a borrowed name, he might find a refuge, barren as that refuge might be of all life's sweetness. Freedom now was his. Should he put the past forever behind him, make his disappearance good, and without more ado drop out of sight and sound forever? All his instinct rebelled against this drastic solution, this cavalier denial of life and its mental exercise for a career of empty futility. What remained then? To go back to the life he had left behind him on the day he ceased to be Harry Sevier? Why not? He was free--free to be himself again. Only one, beside Echo, had known that he and the captured house-breaker were identical--that was Craig. And Craig had been taken from his path. And who else would connect Harry Sevier, the lawyer, the club-man of well-known and reputable past, the favourite of drawing-rooms--who could ever associate him with a tawdry burglar and desperate convict who had escaped from a penitentiary in another State? Once more bearded and eye-glassed, without scar or mark to point resemblance or beckon identification, recognition would be the wildest improbability.