eaven--I know it now. To-day I wake to know what life means, and
I see--Rosalie! I know now--but how? In taking all she had to give. What
does she get in return? Nothing--nothing. Because I love her, because
the whole world is nothing beside her, nor life, nor twenty lives, if
I had them to give, I must say to her now: 'Rosalie, it was love that
brought you to my arms, it is love that says, Thus far and no farther.
Never again--never--never--never!' Yesterday I could have left her--died
or vanished, without real hurt to her. She would have mourned and broken
her heart and mended it again; and I should have been only a memory--of
mystery, of tenderness. Then, one day she would have married, and no
sting from my going would have remained. She would have had happiness,
and I neither shame nor despair.... To-day it is all too late. We have
drunk too deep-alas! too deep. She cannot marry another man, for ghosts
will not lie for asking, and what is mine may not be another's. She
cannot marry me, for what once was mine is mine still by ring and by
book, and I should always be haunted by a torturing shadow. Kathleen
has the right of way, not Rosalie. Ah, Rosalie, I dare not wrong you
further. Yet to marry you, even as things are, if that might be! To live
on here unrecognised? I am little like my old self, and year after year
I should grow less and less like Charley Steele.... But, no, it is not
possible!"

He stopped short in his thoughts, and his lips tightened in bitterness.

"God in heaven, what an impasse!" he said aloud.

There was a sudden crackling of twigs as a man rose up from a log by the
wayside ahead of him. It was Jo Portugais, who had seen him coming, and
had waited for him. He had heard Charley's words.

"Do you call me an impasse, M'sieu'?" Charley grasped Portugais' hand.

"What has happened, M'sieu'?" Jo asked anxiously. There was a brief
silence, and then Charley told him of the events of the morning.

"You know of the mark-here?" he asked, touching his breast.

Jo nodded. "I saw, when you were ill."

"Yet you never asked!"

"I studied it out--I knew old Louis Trudel. Also, I saw ma'm'selle nail
the cross to the church door. Two and two together in my mind did it. I
didn't think Paulette Dubois would tell. I warned her."

"She quarrelled with mademoiselle. It was revenge.

"She might have been less vindictive. She had had good luck herself
lately."

"What good luck had she, M'sieu'?"

Charley