Harry looked up. The colour had faded from his face, but it was alight with a new energy and resolution. The call had found him, and at that moment the harrowing dread--the problem itself, which had shown so imminent--seemed to have grown dim, to have drawn into the far distance. "Yes," he answered slowly, "yes, Brent. I will come." CHAPTER XXXVIII THE CHALLENGE Looking back upon that day, Sevier was often to wonder whether indeed he had missed Fate's purpose, and blinded by a personal ambition, had set its plan at naught. For that instant's decision was to prove the key to a series of fateful doings which bore him on, irresistibly, into a line of action from which, deliberately, he must have shrunk. But having set his hand, it was characteristic of him that he did not falter. It had required resolution to put Echo and his relations with her into the background, but he accomplished even this, and he allowed no thought of possible complications to affect his mental serenity. His face was composed and determined as he descended from the train, at dusk of the sixteenth, at the familiar city station, to find--as Brent had arranged--his motor waiting for him, with Bob, his chauffeur, wearing a broad grin of welcome, at its door. So pleasantly habitual it all seemed, so sharply remembered was each sight and sound as the car sped through the glimmering traffic, that almost he could have believed the past year, full as it had been of pain, a vacuous dream and that no hideous hiatus had lain between the then and now. He was sensible for the first time of the intense mental strain he had been labouring under since his sluggish prison routine had opened into this dubious freedom--the tension of his struggle, the instinct of impending catastrophe, and the ghastly doubt of himself where Echo was concerned. The lassitude and inaction of the Bungalow had added to this strain. The relief now of movement and action brought surcease, and a feeling of present confidence, if not of definite security. Before he reached his apartment, he was sufficiently himself to give the welcome he received from Aunt Judy and from Suzuki a feeling of usualness. Brent, with two or three others who saw eye to eye with him, so far as the exigencies of the political situation were concerned, spent a part of the later evening with him and the talk furnished the final tonic--if any had been needed--to brace him for the task that awaited. That night, for the first time in many months, he slept the deep, fortifying sleep of utter and dreamless unconsciousness.