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174 adventurers, political secret agents, whichever they were, they had had wit and wisdom to organise their plot so that no trace was left of it and them, and they were beyond all reach of justice, as it seemed, for ever. And of the woman, to whom his only clue was the fairness of her face, he had learned nothing. Shadowy, fugitive, lost in mystery, fantastic as a madman's dream, the hold she had gained upon his thoughts was so utterly foreign to them, that it was the stronger once admitted there. Speculation was wholly antagonistic to him—his nature was forcible, single, vigorous; that he acted greatly when great occasions arose, was due to the mould in which his character was naturally cast, not to any premeditation or previous contest and sifting of principles; he lived, as all hold men do, meeting accident or emergency as it came, content with the activity of the present, looking very rarely to anything past, never to anything future. To sift moral problems, to torture himself with theoretical questions, was what would no more have occurred to Erceldoune than to have sat twisting ropes of the Bosphorus sand; hence the poetic unreality of the memory which possessed him was so abhorrent and antagonistic to his whole temperament that it gave a deeper colouring to his life, once received, than it would have