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Rh had held valiantly to his work, even using it, as Jennifer had said, for a sword against himself. He remembered the cruel mockery of those sketches in the Grey Wolf bunk-room. Dick had no more to help him through life than what they told. He had nothing to hold to. What wonder then if he fell? But had he fallen any further than Tempest? Than Tempest, who knew and preached the right—to others?

Tempest went late to his bed that night, and when he said good-bye to Jennifer in the morning his manner was very gentle.

"I owe you a very great deal," he said. "And I owe Dick a very great deal." He smiled. "He knew that before I did," he added. "But perhaps he can bear to hear it again."

He saw Bolton for a moment on the Regina Station as the train carried him East, and the jovial Inspector shook his hand warmly.

"’Pon my soul, you look better already, old fellow," he said. "Wait till the pretty girls in Ontario get hold of you. They'll knock ten years off you."

"Thank you," said Tempest. "I think I don't want to lose those years, Bolton. Not a blessed one of them."

His welcome at home shamed him again. They were so transparently joyful at his coming, and he had wanted so little to come. He knew that all the great issues of his life were bound up for ever with the West: with the places where he had suffered and lost and gained so much. And yet he found that there was something for him to gain in the old home. Some panacea which he had needed and which nothing else could have given him. He found it in his mother's kiss, and in Betty's throttling embraces, and in Lloyd's hand-grip. It was Lloyd who got down to the heart of the matter at once, reading him as a man reads his kind.

"You won't get old Neil to cut the Service and settle down over here, mother," he said. "You may trot out your eligibles and stay him with dinner-parties and comfort him with dances all you know—and it won't help you worth a cent. Something else has booked him, mother, and we're going to lose him."