“Never--! Never!” Colonel Kenwynton clasped his hand on the visitor’s hand. “But for you on that day I should have been these forty odd years in hell.” “Then follow me. I have something to say. It must be in private--something to disclose. You can trust me, Colonel--Shoulder to Shoulder!” “Trust you? To the death--Shoulder to Shoulder!” Colonel Kenwynton cried, in a fervor of enthusiasm. Nevertheless he was chilled while he hastily half dressed and emerged into the dank obscurity of the guards. His hand trembled as he laid it on the stair rail. “An old man,” his lips were involuntarily formulating the words, as he followed his guide, who was descending to the lower deck. “An old man,” and he drew his overcoat about him. Colonel Kenwynton was born to authority and had had the opportunities of command. But his martial experience had taught him also to obey, and when he had once accepted a mandate he did not hesitate nor even harbor an independent thought. With his soft, broad felt hat drawn far over his brows, down the stairs thumped his groping old feet, doggedly active. The wind was surging amidst the low clouds which were flying before the blast in illimitable phalanxes in some distraught panic of defeat. There must have been a moon lurking beyond their rack and rout, for the weird night landscape was strangely distinct, the forests that restricted the horizon bowed, and bent, and rose again in definite undulations to the successive gusts. One might hardly say how the surface of the far spread of water was discerned, dark, vaguely lustrous, with abysmal suggestions, though with never a glimmer, save where the dim lights of the boat pierced the glooms with a dull ray, here and there, or lay along ripples close at hand with a limited, shoaling glister. These shallows covered the line of the treacherous sand-bar that had been secretly a-building all summer beneath the surface with the deposits of silt and in the uncovenanted ways of the great water course, till now the tow-head was possibly a peninsula in lieu of the island it had once been, and the packets of the line would never again find free passage as of yore between its stretches and the bank. Accustomed eyes could see how far extended the stabilities of the tow-head and thus differentiate the definite land formation from the element of land transition, that was neither land nor water. Here the wind made great sport, shrilling along the desolate arid spaces of the pallid sand dunes defenseless against the blast. A wild night, and cold. The tread of his guide was silent--one might almost say secret. He came to a shuddering galvanic pause as he suddenly encountered a watchman, a lantern in his hand. The big, burly Irishman gazed with round, unfriendly, challenging eyes at the foremost of the two advancing figures, then catching sight of the familiar face of the Colonel his whole aspect changed; he beamed with jovial recognition.