Stuart folded his arms and looked at him a moment, debating the question as to whether he would wring his neck or just leave him to freeze. Bivens rushed up to the lawyer and tried to shake his half-frozen fist in his face. "I want you to understand, that I've taken all I'm going to from you to-day, Jim Stuart!" he fairly screamed. "Put your hand on me again and I'll kill you if I can get hold of one of these guns. I want you to remember that I'm the master of millions." "Yesterday in New York," Stuart answered with contempt, "you were the master of millions. Here to-night, on this marsh, in this desert of freezing waters, you're an insect, you're a microbe!" "I'm man enough to take no more orders from a one-horse lawyer," Bivens answered, savagely. "All right, to hell with you!" Stuart said, contemptuously, as he turned and left him. He began to walk briskly along the marsh to keep warm. Nan was playing the soft strains of an old-fashioned song. He stopped and listened a moment in awe at the strange effects. The sob and moan of the wind through the yacht's shrouds and halyards came like the throb of a hidden orchestra, accompanying the singer in the cabin. The old song stirred his soul. The woman who was singing it was his by every law of nature. The little shrivelled, whining fool, who would die if he left him there, had taken her from him; not by the power of manhood, but by the lure of gold that he had taken from the men who had earned it. All he had to do to-night was to apply the law of self-interest by which this man had lived and waxed mighty, and to-morrow he could take the woman be loved in his arms, move into his palace its master and hers. There could be no mistake about Nan's feelings. He had read the yearning of her heart with unerring insight. Visions of a life of splendour, beauty and power with her by his side swept his imagination. A sense of fierce, exultant triumph filled his soul. But most alluring of all whispered joys was the dream of their love-life. The years of suffering and denial, of grief and pain, of bitterness and disappointment would make its final realization all the more wonderful. She was just reaching the maturity of womanhood, barely thirty-one, and had yet to know the meaning of love's real glory. "She's mine and I'll take her!" he cried at last. "Let the little, scheming, oily, cunning scoundrel die to-night by his own law of self-interest--I've done my part." Again the music swept over the white foaming waters. His heart was suddenly flooded with memories of his boyhood, its dreams of heroic deeds; his mother's serene face; his father's high sense of honour; and the traditions of his boyhood that make character noble and worth while, traditions that created a race of free-men before a dollar became the measure of American manhood.