red because they had been born for the peace of
chimney corners! She--the thought of her--could bring the past crowding
upon him and create in his mind a suicidal bent!

Pearls! A great distaste of life fell upon him; the adventure grew flat.
The zest that had been his ten days gone, where was it?

Imagination! He had been cursed with too much of it. In his youth he had
skulked through alleys and back streets--the fear of laughter and ridicule
dogging his mixed heels. Never before to have paused to philosophize over
what had caused his wasted life! Too much imagination! Mental strabismus!
He had let his over-sensitive imagination wreck and ruin him. A woman's
laughter had given him the viewpoint of a careless world; and he had fled,
and he had gone on fleeing all these years from pillar to post. From a
shadow!

He was something of a monster. He saw now where the fault lay. He had
never stayed long enough in any one place for people to get accustomed to
him. His damnable imagination! And there was conceit of a sort. Probably
nobody paid any attention to him after the initial shock and curiosity
had died away. There was Scarron in his wheel chair--merry and cheerful
and brave, jesting with misfortune; and men and women had loved him.

A moral coward, and until this hour he had never sensed the truth! That
was it! He had been a moral coward; he had tried to run away from fate;
and here he was at last, in the blind alley the coward always found at the
end of the run. He had never thought of anything but what he was--never of
what he might have been. For having thrust him unfinished upon a
thoughtless rather than a heartless world he had been trying to punish
fate, and had punished only himself. A wastrel, a roisterer by night, a
spendthrift, and a thief!

What had she said?--reknead his soul so that it would fit his face? Too
late!

One staff to lean on, one only--he never broke his word. Why had he laid
down for himself this law? What had inspired him to hold always to that?
Was there a bit of gold somewhere in his grotesque make-up? A straw on the
water, and he clutched it! Why? Cunningham laughed again, and the
steersman turned his head slightly.

"Williams, do you believe in God?" asked Cunningham.

"Well, sir, when I'm holding down the wheel--perhaps. The screw is always
edging a ship off, and the lighter the ballast the wider the yaw. So you
have to keep hitching her over a point to starboard. You trust to me