bed until he found his buckskin bag and his precious crystal, and
fled precipitately from the room. Lifted by this second shock from his
apathy, he returned to the fixed idea of his life,--the discovery and
creation of the diamond,--and forgot all else. The feeble grasp that his
shaken intellect kept of the events of the night relaxed, the disguised
Lance, the story of his son, the murder, slipped into nothingness; there
remained only the one idea, his nightly watch by the diamond pit. The
instinct of long habit was stronger than the darkness or the onset of
the storm, and he kept his tottering way over stream and fallen timber
until he reached the spot. A sudden tremor seemed to shake the lambent
flame that had lured him on. He thought he heard the sound of voices;
there were signs of recent disturbance,--footprints in the sawdust! With
a cry of rage and suspicion, Fairley slipped into the pit and sprang
toward the nearest opening. To his frenzied fancy it had been tampered
with, his secret discovered, the fruit of his long labors stolen from
him that very night. With superhuman strength he began to open the pit,
scattering the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the
suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At times
the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides
of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind
instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury
his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. At last, the paroxysm
past, he sank back again in his old apathetic attitude of watching,
the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible. In this
attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.

It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the
broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first,
and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes;
it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose