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Rh from a long day's patrol, struck her across the clutching hands with the little switch he carried. It was a light blow, but it made her spring back, glaring like a wild cat.

"I hate you," she gasped. "I hate you. I will keel you. Some day I will make you keel."

"You are welcome to try." He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know that I want to prevent you. Will you leave me alone now?"

"To be whipped," she said through her teeth. "Ah! To be whipped! I hate you."

"That's the most cheerful thing I've heard for a long time," said Dick dryly. "Stick to it, my dear girl;" and he pushed past her and went back, leaving her standing in the trail.

That night he tried for the fifth time to write to Jennifer. But it was of no use. His own thoughts and his own will had made of this matter a thing so sordid and dishonourable that he could not put down in words for her to read, and he could not write to her and not speak of it. He was not even sorry for Andree now. He was not even glad for Tempest. And at that moment he heard Tempest in the passage speaking to Bond.

"Certainly," said Tempest. "You may depend on me. I'll have it attended to at once."

Dick laughed a little, biting on his pipe-stem. It was he who had ensured that Tempest should speak and act so again. But where was his own reward? He had lost, half-unfolded, the big case which was to have meant so much to him. He had lost his friend; he had lost such self-respect as he had, and life seemed a deadlock, with little capacity for more pleasure or pain in it. Then, because it is not in nature that a deadlock can continue for very long, one morning when spring was near and the first waveys flew north again, Tempest sent for him into the office. There were some official letters on the desk, and Tempest's manner was fully as official.

"I am ordered to make an investigatory patrol through the uncharted land between Great Slave Lake and Fullerton," he said. "Flora, fauna, geological conditions, inhabitants, and so on. I am to take three men with me, and your name is mentioned as one of the three. We leave as