He turned to the right, burying himself deeper and deeper into the
great silence of the north, his quick steps keeping pace with the
thoughts that were passing through his brain. Fate, bad luck,
circumstance--they had been against him. He had told himself this
a hundred times, had laughed at them with the confidence of one
who knew that some day he would rise above these things in
triumph. And yet what were these elements of fortune, as he had
called them, but people? A feeling of personal resentment began to
oppress him. People had downed him, and not circumstance and bad
luck. Men and women had made a failure of him, and not fate. For
the first time it occurred to him that the very men and women whom
Brokaw and his associates had duped, whom Pearce was duping, would
play the game in the same way if they had the opportunity. What if
he had played on the winning side, if he had enlisted his fighting
energies with men like Brokaw and Pearce, fought for money and
power in place of this other thing, which seemed to count so
little? Other men would have given much to have been in his favor
with Eileen Brokaw. He might have been in the front of this other
fight, the winning fight, the possessor of fortune, a beautiful
woman--

He stopped suddenly. It seemed to him that he had heard a voice.
He had climbed from out of the shadow of the forest until he stood
now on a gray cliff of rock that reached out into the Bay, like
the point of a great knife guarding Churchill. A block of
sandstone rose in his path, and he passed quietly around it. In
another instant he had flattened himself against it.

A dozen feet away, full in the moonlight, three figures sat on the