House the day before. One of them was short and to the point. It was an
official note from headquarters ordering him to join a certain Buck Nome
at Lac Bain, a hundred miles farther north.

It was the second letter which Steele took in his hands for the
twentieth time since it had come to him here, three hundred miles into
the wilderness. There were half-a-dozen pages of it, written in a
woman's hand, and from it there rose to his nostrils the faint, sweet
perfume of hyacinth. It was this odor that troubled him--that had
troubled him since yesterday, and that made him restless and almost
homesick to-night. It took him back to things--to the days of not so
very long ago when he had been a part of the life from which the letter
came, and when the world had seemed to hold for him all that one could
wish. In a retrospective flash there passed before him a vision of those
days, when he, Mr. Philip Steele, son of a multimillionaire banker, was
one of the favored few in the social life of a great city; when
fashionable clubs opened their doors to him, and beautiful women smiled
upon him, and when, among others, this girl of the hyacinth letter held
out to him the tempting lure of her heart. Her heart? Or was it the
tempting of his own wealth? Steele laughed, and his strong white teeth
gleamed in a half-contemptuous smile as he turned again toward the fire.

He sat down, with the letter still in his hands, and thought of some of
those others whom he had known. What had become of Jack Moody, he
wondered--the good old Jack of his college days, who had loved this girl
of the hyacinth with the whole of his big, honest heart, but who hadn't
been given half a show because of his poverty? And where was Whittemore,
the young broker whose hopes had fallen with his own financial ruin; and
Fordney, who would have cut off ten years of his life for her--and
half-a-dozen others he might name?