He often
thought, and with a bitter feeling against himself that it came too late,
of the dying trust of her father:

'Guard her and cherish her, as if you were indeed my son and she your
sister . . . If it should be that you and Stephen should find that there
is another affection between you remember I sanction it. But give her
time! I trust that to you! She is young, and the world is all before
her. Let her choose . . . And be loyal to her, if it is another! It may
be a hard task; but I trust you, Harold!' Here he would groan, as all the anguish of the past would rush back upon
him; and keenest of all would be the fear, suspicion, thought which grew
towards belief, that he may have betrayed that trust. . . . At first the side of this memory personal to his own happiness was
faintly emphasised; the important side was of the duty to Stephen. But
as time went on the other thought became a sort of corollary; a timid,
halting, blushing thought which followed sheepishly, borne down by
trembling hope. No matter what adventure came to him, the thought of
neglected duty returned ever afresh. Once, when he lay sick for weeks in
an Indian wigwam, the idea so grew with each day of the monotony, that
when he was able to crawl out by himself into the sunshine he had almost
made up his mind to start back for home. Luck is a strange thing. It seems in some mysterious way to be the
divine machinery for adjusting averages. Whatever may be the measure of
happiness or unhappiness, good or evil, allotted to anyone, luck is the
cause or means of counter-balancing so that the main result reaches the
standard set. From the time of Harold's illness Dame Fortune seemed to change her
attitude to him. The fierce frown, nay! the malignant scowl, to which he
had become accustomed, changed to a smile. Hitherto everything seemed to
have gone wrong with him; but now all at once all seemed to go right. He
grew strong and hardy again. Indeed, he seemed by contrast to his late
helplessness to be so strong and hard that it looked as if that very
illness had done him good instead of harm. Game was plentiful, and he
never seemed to want. Everywhere he went there were traces of gold, as
though by some instinct he was tracking it to its home. He did not value
gold for its own sake; but he did for the ardour of the search. Harold
was essentially a man, and as a man an adventurer. To such a man of such
a race adventure is the very salt of existence. The adventurer's instinct took with it the adventurer's judgment; Harold
was not content with small results. Amidst the vast primeval forces
there were, he felt, vast results of their prehistoric working; and he
determined to find some of them. In such a quest, purpose is much. It
was hardly any wonder, then, that in time Harold found himself alone in
the midst of one of the great treasure-places of the world. Only labour
was needed to take from the earth riches beyond the dreams of avarice. But that labour was no easy problem; great and difficult distance had to
be overcome; secrecy must be observed, for even a whisper of the
existence of such a place would bring a horde of desperadoes. But all
these difficulties were at least sources of interest, if not in
themselves pleasures. The new Harold, seemingly freshly created by a
year of danger and strenuous toil, of self-examining and humiliation, of
the realisation of duty, and--though he knew it not as yet--of the
dawning of hope, found delight in the thought of dangers and difficulties
to be overcome. Having taken his bearings exactly so as to be safe in
finding the place again, he took his specimens with him and set out to
find the shortest and best route to the nearest port. At length he came to the port and set quietly about finding men. This he
did very carefully and very systematically. Finally, with the full
complement, and with ample supply of stores, he started on his expedition
to the new goldfields. It is not purposed to set out here the extraordinary growth of Robinson
City, for thus the mining camp soon became. Its history has long ago
been told for all the world. In the early days, when everything had to
be organised and protected, Harold worked like a giant, and with a system
and energy which from the first established him as a master. But when
the second year of his exile was coming to a close, and Robinson City was
teeming with life and commerce, when banks and police and soldiers made
life and property comparatively safe, he began to be restless again. This
was not the life to which he had set himself. He had gone into the
wilderness to be away from cities and from men; and here a city had
sprung up around him and men claimed him as their chief. Moreover, with
the restless feeling there began to come back to him the old thoughts and
the old pain. But he felt strong enough by this time to look forward in life as well as
backward. With him now to think was to act; so much at least he had
gained from his position of dominance in an upspringing city. He quietly
consolidated such outlying interests as he had, placed the management of
his great estate in the hands of a man he had learned to trust, and
giving out that he was going to San Francisco to arrange some business,
left Robinson City. He had already accumulated such a fortune that the
world was before him in any way he might choose to take. Knowing that at San Francisco, to which he had booked, he would have to
run the gauntlet of certain of his friends and business connections, he
made haste to leave the ship quietly at Portland, the first point she
touched on her southern journey. Thence he got on the Canadian Pacific
Line and took his way to Montreal. What most arrested his attention, and in a very disconcerting way, were
the glimpses of English life one sees reproduced so faithfully here and
there in Canada. The whole of the past rushed back on him so
overpoweringly that he was for the moment unnerved. The acute feeling of
course soon became mitigated; but it was the beginning of a
re-realisation of what had been, and which grew stronger with each mile
as the train swept back eastward. At first he tried to fight it; tried with all the resources of his strong
nature. His mind was made up, he assured himself over and over again. The past was past, and what had been was no more to him than to any of
the other passengers of the train. Destiny had long ago fulfilled
itself. Stephen no doubt had by now found some one worthy of her and had
married. In no dream, sleeping or waking, could he ever admit that she
had married Leonard; that was the only gleam of comfort in what had grown
to be remorse for his neglected duty. And so it was that Harold An Wolf slowly drifted, though he knew it not,
into something of the same intellectual position which had dominated him
when he had started on his journeying and the sunset fell nightly on his
despairing face.