heart
now--we two shall meet and know each other! With that conviction strong
within me, I volunteered for this service, as I would have volunteered
for anything that set work and hardship and danger, like ramparts,
between my misery and me. With that conviction strong within me still, I
tell you it is no matter whether I stay here with the sick, or go hence
with the strong. I shall live till I have met that man! There is a day
of reckoning appointed between us. Here in the freezing cold, or away in
the deadly heat; in battle or in shipwreck; in the face of starvation;
under the shadow of pestilence--I, though hundreds are falling round me,
I shall live! live for the coming of one day! live for the meeting with
one man!"

He stopped, trembling, body and soul, under the hold that his own
terrible superstition had fastened on him. Crayford drew back in silent
horror. Wardour noticed the action--he resented it--he appealed, in
defense of his one cherished conviction, to Crayford's own experience of
him.

"Look at me!" he cried. "Look how I have lived and thriven, with
the heart-ache gnawing at me at home, and the winds of the icy north
whistling round me here! I am the strongest man among you. Why? I have
fought through hardships that have laid the best-seasoned men of all our
party on their backs. Why? What have _I_ done, that my life should throb
as bravely through every vein in my body at this minute, and in this
deadly place, as ever it did in the wholesome breezes of home? What am
I preserved for? I tell you again, for the coming of one day--for the
meeting with one man."

He paused once more. This time Crayford spoke.

"Richard!" he said, "since we first met, I have believed in your better
nature, against all outward appearance. I have believed in you, firmly,
truly, as your brother might. You are putting that belief to a hard
test. If your enemy had told me that you had ever talked as you talk
now, that you had ever looked as you look now, I would have turned my
back on him as the utterer of a vile calumny against a just, a brave, an
upright man. Oh! my friend, my friend, if ever I have deserved well of
you, put away these thoughts from your heart! Face me again, with the
stainless look of a man who has trampled under his feet the bloody
superstitions of revenge, and knows them no more! Never, never, let the
time come when I cannot offer you my hand as I offer it now, to the man
I can still admire--to the brot