over again, his eyes scorching, but his finger steady, as it traced the
lines slowly: "the obscure death..." "embezzled trustmoneys..." "the
final seal of shame upon a misspent life!"

These were the epitaphs on the tombstone of Charley Steele; dead and
buried, out of sight, out of repute, soon to be out of mind and out of
memory, save as a warning to others--an old example raked out of the
dust-bin of time by the scavengers of morality, to toss at all who trod
the paths of dalliance.

What was there to do? Go back? Go back and knock at Kathleen's door,
another Enoch Arden, and say: "I have come to my own again?" Return and
tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more? Break up
this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced? Summon
Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true
to her all these years?

To what end? What had he ever done for her that he might destroy her
now? What sort of Spartan tragedy was this, that the woman who had been
the victim of circumstances, who had been the slave to a tie he never
felt, yet which had been as iron-bound to her, should now be brought out
to be mangled body and soul for no fault of her own? What had she done?
What had she ever done to give him right to touch so much as a hair of
her head?

Go back, and bring Billy to justice, and clear his own name? Go back,
and send Kathleen's brother, the forger, to jail? What an achievement
in justice! Would not the world have a right to say that the only decent
thing he could do was to eliminate himself from the equation? What
profit for him in the great summing-up, that he was technically innocent
of this one thing, and that to establish his innocence he broke a
woman's heart and destroyed a boy's life? To what end! It was the
murderer coming back as a ghost to avenge himself for being hanged.
Suppose he went back--the death's-head at the feast--what would there be
for himself afterwards; for any one for whom he was responsible? Living
at that price?

To die and end it all, to disappear from this petty life where he had
done so little, and that little ill? To die?

No. There was in him some deep, if obscure, fatalism after all. If he
had been meant to die now, why had he not gone to the bottom of the
river that yesterday at the Cote Dorion? Why had he been saved by this
yokel at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain
hut, wrapped in silence and lost to the