ike
that. They made me believe that it was true--_true_. And there was shame
and agony--and hope. It seemed they could not all be wrong, and I have
asked and prayed that I might make it true always--and--and forgiveness
for what I was."

"You mean," he said again hoarsely, and he stepped toward her now, "you
mean that you are--_straight_!"

She did not answer--only now she turned her face toward him and lifted
up her head.

And for a long minute Madison gazed into the tear-splashed eyes, deep,
brave in chastened wistfulness, gazed--and like a man stunned walked
from the room, the cottage, and out across the lawn.

--XX--

TO THE VICTOR ARE THE SPOILS

Many were still about the lawn as he left the cottage--they were all
about him, those sick, half frantic creatures--and still they made
noises; still some of them cried and sobbed; still in their waning
paroxysms they moved hither and thither. They appealed to some numbed,
dormant sense in Madison, in a subconscious way, as things to be
avoided. And so, almost mechanically, he took the little path that,
striking off at right angles to the wagon track where it joined the
Patriarch's lawn, came out again upon the main road at the further end
of the village.

And, as he walked, like tidal waves on-rushing, emotions, utterly at
variance one with another, hurled themselves upon him, and he was swept
from his mental balance, tossed here and there, rolled gasping,
strangling in the chaos and turmoil of the waters, as it were, and,
rising, was hurled back again.

White as death itself was Madison's face; and at times his fingers with
a twitching movement curled into clenched fists, at times his open palms
sought his temples in a queer wriggling way and pressed upon them.
Doubt, anger, fear, a rage unhallowed--in cycles--buffeted him until
his brain reeled, and he was as a man distraught.

It began at the beginning, that cycle, and dragged him along--and left
him like one swooning, tottering, upon the edge of a precipice. And then
it began over again.

And it began always with a picture of the Roost that night--the vicious,
unkempt, ragged figure of the Flopper--the sickly, thin, greedy face of
Pale Face Harry, the drug fiend, winching a little as he plunged the
needle into his flesh--the easy, unprincipled gaiety and eagerness of
Helena for the new path of crime--crime--crime--the Roost exuded
crime--filth--immorality--typified them, framed them well as they