"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like
your looks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come
back.'

"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss
her good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she
would take it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she
settled it herself.

"'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'

"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the
Rockies, and I left her standing by the trail and went on after
my dogs. I was six weeks in crossing over the pass and coming
down to the first post on Great Slave Lake."

The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A
steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the
silence Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:

"It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me."

We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the
puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy
dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all
the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who
had lived too easily and too well.

"It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a
whisper.