His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

"Certainly, sir. Any information bearing on the case is of value, and I thank you for coming to me," answered Faunce, as he rose to escort his visitor to the door.

He did not attach any significance to the fact that Colonel Rannock had announced his intention of going to Klondyke, and had not gone there. He might have twenty reasons for throwing his servant off the scent; or he might have changed his mind. The new gold region is too near the North Pole to be attractive to a man of luxurious habits, accustomed to chambers in the Albany, and the run of half a dozen rowdy country houses, where the company was mixed and the play high.

Sport in Scotland and Ireland, sport in Norway, or even in Iceland, might inure a man to a hard life, but it would not bring him within measurable distance of the hazards and hardships in that white world beyond Dawson City.

John Faunce, seated in front of his empty fireplace, listened mechanically to a barrel-organ playing the "Washington Post," and meditated upon Arthur Haldane's statement.

He had not been idle since his return to London, and had made certain inquiries about Colonel Rannock among people who were likely to know. He had interviewed a fashionable gunmaker with whom Rannock had dealt for twenty years, and the secretary of a club which he had frequented for about the same period. The man was frankly Bohemian in his tastes, but had always kept a certain footing in society, and, in his own phrase, had never been "bowled out." He had been banished from no baccarat table, though he was not untainted with a suspicion of occasionally tampering with his stake. He played all the fashionable card games, and, like Dudley Smooth, though he did not cheat, he always won. He had plenty of followers among the callow youth who laughed at his jokes and almost died of his cigars; but he had no friends of his own age and station, and the great ladies of the land never admitted him within their intimate circle, though they might send him a card once or twice a year for a big party, out of friendly feeling for his mother—five-and-twenty years a widow, and for the greater part of her life attached to the Court.

Would such a man wheel a barrow and tramp the snow-bound shores of the Yukon River? Unlikely as the thing seemed, Faunce told himself that it was not impossible. Rannock had fought well in the Indian hill-country, had never been a feather-bed soldier, and had never affected the passing fashion of effeminacy. He had loved music with that inborn love which is like an instinct, and had made himself a fine player with very little trouble, considering the exacting nature of the 'cello; but he had never put on dilettante airs, or pretended that music was the only thing worth living for. He was as much at home with men who painted pictures as with composers and fiddlers. Versatility was the chief note in his character. The Scotch University, the Army school, the mess-room, the continental wanderings of later years, had made him an expert in most things that people care for. He was at home in the best and the worst society.

He was a soldier and a sportsman, tall, and strongly built, a remarkably handsome man in his best days, and handsome still in his moral and social decadence. There was no reason, Faunce thought, why such a man should shrink from the dangers and hardships of the Alaska goldfields, if the whim took him to try his luck there.

Again, there was no reason that he should not have changed his mind at the last hour, and gone to Ostend or Spa, to risk his capital in a more familiar way, at the gaming table instead of the goldfields. Faunce had allies at both places, and he wrote to each of these, bidding him find out if Rannock was, or had been, there. He was not a man who could appear anywhere without attracting notice.

The letters written, Faunce dismissed the subject for the time being. Colonel Rannock's proceedings seemed to him a matter of minor importance, since he doubted if Rannock could be made instrumental in Lady Perivale's rehabilitation. It was the woman he wanted, the woman whose likeness to his client was the source of evil.

Women had been the chief factors in Mr. Faunce's successful coups, and he had seldom failed in his management of that sensitive and impulsive sex.