n."

"Signorina has never lived in the East?"

"I do not see that that matters."

Signor Ricordo laughed quietly.

"It is refreshing to hear you," he said. "I can see into your mind now.
You are thinking that the fatalistic doctrine destroys all virtue, all
responsibility."

"Exactly."

"And yet are we responsible? Is not every action of life determined for
us by circumstances, disposition, heredity, all forces over which we
have no control?"

"And after you admit all that, every faculty of your being tells you you
are responsible. After you have conceded every fatalist argument, you
know that it is wrong. And more, you know that when you do wrong you are
haunted by remorse, because you feel that you _could_ have done right."

"Right! wrong!" said Ricordo, and he laughed in his soft, insinuating
way.

"You do not believe in them?"

"Ah, signorina, let us cease to argue. Your faith is a tree which has
borne such beautiful flowers and such wondrous fruits that you baffle
logic. But then, signorina, you have never lived in hell."

Both Herbert Briarfield and Olive cast quick glances at him, but he did
not alter his position; he walked quietly on, his eyes fixed on the
ground.

"I say, Signor Ricordo," said Briarfield in an expostulating tone.

"That's why I am afraid of the truth," went on Ricordo, without seeming
to notice Briarfield. "When a man has lived in hell for years, it upsets
preconceived notions, it scatters logic to the winds, it makes
conventional morality appear to be--what it is."

Olive Castlemaine felt that the man had thrown a kind of spell upon her.
She did not realise that, to say the least, their conversation was not
what was natural between people who had met for the first time. Had any
one told her the previous day that on meeting a stranger of whom she
knew nothing she would enter into a discussion with him on such topics,
she would have laughed at it as impossible, yet she felt nothing of the
incongruity of the situation. Somehow Ricordo seemed like a voice out of
the past, and for a time she forgot things present.

"You have lived--that is----"

"Yes, Miss Castlemaine, I have lived in hell. I have been deeper into
its depths than Dante ever saw. The flames which he saw have burnt me,
the 'thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice,' which Shakespeare spoke of
have crushed out of me all those qualities natural to humanity. Nay, I
forgot, not all, not all!"

Again Olive Castlemaine