He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening. At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be made to stop her. "It has been a bad mistake for me," he said, as all the wonderful things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife, glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells itself. "Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me," thought James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear against the panel. All was silent in that room.