Poor girl! she will miss me sorely!" And the handsome blackguard sighed over the ruin he had wrought--an honest woman's shattered peace of mind.

It weighed heavily upon him now.
For there came back to him now strange shadowy glimpses of his own stormy past! Dashing on, to face unknown dangers, the dauntless adventurer, with a softened heart, recalled the days when he could gaze, without a secret shudder, upon the battle-torn colors of the regiment from which he had been chased by that suddenly discovered sin, once so sweet! He "looked along life's columned years, to see its riven fane--just where it fell." And, sadly alone in life now, his heart gnawed with a growing remorse, he saw in the mirror of memory, once more, the bright faced boy who had "filled the cup, to toast his flag and land." Alan Hawke, in all the bright promise of his youth, the darling of women, the envy of men! Under the swiftly gliding current of his tortuous past, he plainly saw now the fanged reefs which had wrecked him! With a smothered groan, he recalled all that he had lost, and this bitter introspection brought up to him, among his deeds of passion, the one needless cruelty of his reckless life! "Poor Justine! There is such a thing as woman's love after all!" he sighed, for he knew that the steadfast woman had poured out the wine of her life all in vain.

"She loves me!" he cried! Woman, born to be man's sport and plaything, is doomed to be the unconscious avenger of her sex in every tragedy of the heart! The treason of some callous lover is repaid with vengeance meted out to some defenseless man who comes all unguarded "into the arid desert of Phryne's life, where all is parched and hot." And, Alan Hawke, the innocent Lancelot, had suffered for some recreant's past crime! Among the visions of the burning Lotos Land, the bright phantasmagoria of his unstained youth, there came back now to Alan Hawke all the glories of his first Durbar, the unforgotten day when he had fallen under the spell of the woman whose fatal touch had withered the "very rose and expectancy" of his brilliant promise.

His mind strayed backward through all the misty years to that gorgeous scene of Oriental pomp.

He closed his eyes and pictured again the brilliant pageant.
The huge masses of serried troops, the lines of stately elephants, the castled background of the temples of Aurungzebe.