e store. Say,
Doc, say--ain't dere a chanst ter live straight now we wants ter?"

But Madison did not hear the Flopper save in a vague, inconsequential
way--he was looking at Helena. She had drooped forward a little over the
table, her chin in her hands, her lips quivering--and a white misery in
her face seemed to bring a chill, a numbness to his heart. His Hands
clenched, and he began to pace up and down the room.

How buoyantly he had tackled the problem--buoyant in his own
emancipation, buoyant in his love, in the future full of dreams, full of
inspiration, full of the new life that Helena and he would live
together! How confidently he had settled himself to undo in a moment the
work of months, to outline a mere matter of detail, with never a thought
that he was face to face with a problem that he could never solve--that
brought him to the realization that the game, not he, was the master
still, iron-handed, implacable--that though the mental chains were
loosed it was but as if, in ironic justice, in grim punishment, only
that he might look, clear-visioned, upon the ignominy of the physical
shackles he himself had forged and fashioned so readily, whose breaking
now was beyond his strength.

He had done his work well! In the first few moments, an hour ago, when
he had begun to consider the problem, as seeming difficulties arose, he
had turned coolly from one alternative to another. And then slowly a
sickening sense of the truth had begun to dawn upon him--and like a man
lost in a great forest, peril around him, he had plunged then
desperately in this direction and in that, as a glimmering point of
light here or there had seemed to promise an avenue of escape--only to
find it vanish at almost the first step, the way closed as by some
invisible, remorseless power. No, not invisible--it seemed to take the
form of the Patriarch--for at every turn the majestic figure stood and
would not let him pass.

Madison's face was gray now as he walked up and down the room--there was
his own revulsion, his abhorrence at the part he had played, a frantic,
honorable eagerness to be rid of it; there were these others too who
looked to him, the Flopper and Pale Face Harry; and there was--Helena!
He did not dare to look at the misery in her face again--he was unmanned
enough now.

And then Helena spoke.

"It--it seems," she said, in a low broken way, "as if--as if God did not
want to pardon us--as if our repentance had come too lat