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204 Tempest, and it stung him to the quick that Tempest should be willing to lower his standard of life as he unquestionably was doing. Some unlocated words flashed to his mind suddenly.

The mercilessness of the thought jarred all the love alive in Dick. Such things might be for men spent with toil and years; but for Tempest in full strength and vigour the thing was brutal, unreal, hideous. And yet it seemed very surely true. Tempest turned to the door.

"Put out the light when you go," he said. And then Dick went after him, and laid a hand on his arm.

"You must tell me what's wrong, old man," he said. "Don't you owe me this?"

"There is nothing wrong." Tempest straightened with his face hardening.

"Are you going to marry her, Neil?"

He had not used that name in many years; and his voice went tender with the sound of it. But Tempest drew back; startled, and sternly indignant.

"How did you know what no one has been told?" he asked.

"No one? My dear fellow, you can't surely be as blind as that? Don't you know that there are bets about it from the Landing up to Chipewyan, and probably much further? Everyone knows it. We live in the glare of the footlights along these rivers, as I have found out, I assure you."

Tempest leaned against the door, and his face was drawn and horror-struck. All the finer dreamy reserve of his nature was shocked; outraged; thrown down off its balance for the time. "They are not talking about her," he said. "Not about her?"

It seemed to Dick as though that passionate, vibrating voice would ward off criticism from Andree by the mere force of it. But he had to answer.