t one. And again he had a wild moment of thinking that it would
be possible to put the thing right, to establish his innocence, to
insist upon knowing how it was that Sir William Gore had given the
information to the _Arbiter_, on knowing what the arrangement was with
Pateley on which that _coup de theatre_ had depended, and he sprang to
his feet with the determination that he would go straight back into
Schleppenheim, seek out Pateley and insist upon knowing what had
happened. Then, just as before, the revulsion came. The principal thing,
he had no need to ask Pateley. He knew, and that was the thing other
people might not know. In a little while, he was told, Rachel would be
herself again, and perhaps able to remember: she must not come back to
the knowledge of something that must be such a cruel blow to her faith
in her father, her adoring love for him. And yet as he turned downwards
and strode hurriedly back along the woodland paths, across the shafts of
sunlight which were growing longer as the day wore on, he felt how
absurdly, horribly unequal the two things were that were at stake. On
the one hand his own future, his success, his whole life, all the
possibilities he had dreamt of; on the other, reprobation falling on one
who was beyond the reach of it, one who had no longer any possibilities,
who had nothing to lose, whose hopes and fears of worldly success, whose
agitations had been for ever stilled by the hand of death. And Rachel?
Would the suffering of knowing that her father's memory was attacked, of
being rudely awakened from her illusions to find that in the eyes of the
world he was not, and did not deserve to be, what he had been in hers,
would that suffering be equal to that which he himself was encountering
now? But even as he argued with himself, as he tried to prove that his
own salvation was possible, he knew that when it came to the point he
could do nothing. If it had been a question of another man, whom he
himself could have saved by bringing the accusation home to the right
quarter, he would have done it, he would have felt bound to do it: but
as it was, he knew perfectly well that the thing was impossible. The
fact is that, whether guided by supernatural standards or by those of
instinct and tradition, there are very few of the contingencies in life
in which the man accustomed to act honestly up to his own code is really
in doubt as to what, by that code, he ought to do: and by the time that
Rend