Very reverently he kissed the letter, then burned it in the flame of the smoky lamp. It was a long and weary ride to the nearest telegraph office at Gunnison, yet he never dismounted from his staggering horse until he heard the clicking of the sounders in the dingy little office.
"My life is yours alone," he wrote firmly; "let me make amends. Will you mold the chalice?"
Feverishly he strode up and down his apartment at the hotel until her answering wire was laid in his hand:
"You are even more noble than I thought, and shall have your reward. Grace waits you at Cairo. Have written her all that she must ever know. Go at once and God bless you both!"
He left that night for the East, and at the house of the Brevoorts learned that Mr. Brevoort and his wife had taken their departure two days before on an extended tour of the Orient. Yes, Mrs. Brevoort had left an enclosure for him.
It contained only a little note from Grace Carter to Constance and in his misery he could not understand why the latter had urged him to go to Cairo:
"I forgive you, even as I think God has forgiven you," Grace wrote, "for I, too, have been whirled in the maelstrom of his irresistible passion. I do not presume to sit in judgment of you, for you have given him his life—and at what an awful price! May God grant you forgetfulness, the boon that has been denied me."
Underneath this was written in Mrs. Carter's angular hand:
"I found this on my daughter's table the day after she was stricken down by brain fever, and an investigation of her correspondence shows it to have been intended for you. Now that the danger is passed and she is on the way to recovery, I send it to you with my contempt. Deem yourself fortunate that it is not my curse, instead."
On the forward deck of the great ocean grayhound that was cleaving the waters at record speed, a man stood that night with his face turned ever to the East. It would be ten days more before he could kiss the hem of her garment in supplication, ten days of hell in whose torturing fires his soul shriveled with a sickening fear.