It was useless--intuitively he had known it was useless from the instant he had heard her voice.

It was always the same--always! For years she had eluded him like that, come upon him without warning and disappeared, but leaving always that tangible proof of her existence--a letter, the call of the Gray Seal to arms.

But to-night it was as it had never been before.

It was not alone baffled chagrin now, not alone the longing, the wild desire to see her face, to look into her eyes--it was life and death.

She had come at the very moment when she, perhaps alone of all the world, could have pointed the way out, when life, liberty, everything that was common to them both was at stake, in deadly peril--and she had gone, ignorant of it all, leaving him staggered by the very possibility of the succour that was held up before his eyes only to be snatched away without power of his to grasp it.