Noontide in June. A sky of the clearest, palest azure, and a rollicking, swelling, tumbling sea, full of smooth billowy waves chasing each other over its deep green surface—waves with their white crests blown backwards, throwing their spray high in the air and seeming to laugh and call to each other in gurgling voices; and between sea and sky the liquid golden sunlight filling the warm, throbbing air, spreading itself in dazzling sheets upon the water, and glinting in ten thousand glittering points on the flying spray thrown up by a steamer's screw. It was the steamer Prince, homeward-bound from Alaska, carrying passengers and a cargo as rich and yellow as the sunshine. And as if it knew of its precious and costly charge, the steamer cut proudly through the turbulent water, cleaving its straight passage homeward, homeward. On the deck of the boat, leaning back idly in a long chair, his calm, grey eyes fixed on the receding shores, where the golden sunshine seemed palpitating on their perilous loveliness, Talbot was sitting, with the freshening breeze stirring his hair and bringing to him the breath of a thousand spring flowers on the land. He was returning, and returning successful, with his work accomplished, his toil over, his aim achieved, and amongst all the lines of pain stamped on his pale and quiet face there was written a certain triumph, that yet perhaps was not so much triumph as relief. It was just four months since that terrible night when he had lost both his comrades, just a little less than four months since he had seen them both laid side by side in their lonely grave in the west gulch; and those four months would ever be a blot of horrible blackness on his life. Should he ever be able to forget the blank desolation that had closed in upon him night after night as he sat by his lonely hearth or paced the floor, his steps alone breaking the awful stillness? Yet he had forced himself to stay and face it, had continued his work and his method of life unchanged. His men had noted little difference in him. He had stayed the time he had appointed for himself, had accomplished his self-appointed task, and at last, when the summer burst in upon the gulch and loosened all Nature's fetters, he found himself also free; and now, like a black curtain rent in twain and torn from the bright face of a picture, the clouds of the past seemed falling away, leaving his future clear to his gaze. It stretched before him bright as the laughing sunlit sea beneath his eyes. If they could but have shared his joy, if they could have had their home-coming, his fellow-toilers, his fellow-prisoners! and the salt tears stung his lids until he closed them, shutting out the vivid yellow light, as he thought of the desolate grave in the gulch.

The fresh, cool air fanned his face and the sun smiled upon him, a loose piece of canvas of an awning near him flapped backwards and forwards with a monotonous musical sound, the plash and gurgle of the tumbling waves fell soothingly on his ears. Gradually sleep came over him gently, and enwrapped his strained, wearied body, his sore bruised mind.

When he opened his eyes again it was afternoon. The steamer was still flying onward, but the sea was quiet and smooth, and lay still on every side in the sun's rays as a pool of liquid gold, and the shores of Alaska had vanished, lost in a burnished haze of light.

THE END.