The train is laid, the fuse is lit, long before we know it.
That night, as Robert Trenholme sealed his letters, an event took place that was to test by a strange influence the lives of these three people--Robert Trenholme, the lady of whom he thought so pleasantly, and the young brother to whom he had written so laboriously.

And the event was that an old settler, who dwelt in a remote part of the country, went out of his cabin in the delusive moonlight, slipped on a steep place, and fell, thereby receiving an inward hurt that was to bring him death..