ining two lives where one will do."

"There's such a thing as losing your life to find it."

"If so, it's something for me to do--alone."

"Isn't it a kind of moral cowardice to say that?"

"I don't think so. To me it seems only looking things squarely in the
face. I'm not the sort of man for whom there's any possibility of
beginning life anew. A man like me can't live things down. When once, by
his own confession, he has lost his honor, there's no rehabilitation
that can make him a man again. Like Cain, he has got to go out from the
presence of the Lord; only, unlike Cain, there's no land of Nod waiting
to receive him. There's no place for him anywhere on earth. A few years
ago, when I was motoring in the Black Forest with the d'Aubignys, we
dropped into a little hole of an inn as nearly out of the world as
anything could be. As we approached the door a man got up from a bench
and shambled away. When he had got to what he considered a safe distance
he turned to look at us. I knew him. It was Jacques de la Tour de
Lorme."

"Really?"

"The poor wretch had hidden himself in that God-forsaken spot, where he
supposed no one would be able to track him down; but we had done it.
I've never forgotten his weary gait or the woe-begone look in his eyes.
It is what would come to me if I waited for it."

"I don't see why. There's no similarity between the cases. Jacques de La
Tour de Lorme did wrong he never could put right. You'd be doing the
very thing he found impossible." He shook his head. "It wouldn't make
any difference in my world. Nobody there would think of the right or the
wrong; they'd only consider what I'd owned to. It's the confession that
would ruin me."

"Surely you exaggerate. You could do it quietly. No one need
know--outside Derek Pruyn and two or three more of us."

"I don't do
things in that way," he said, with an odd return of his old-time pride.
"If I put the woman right, it shall be in the eyes of the world. I don't
ask to have things made easy for me. If I do it at all, I shall do it
thoroughly. I'm not afraid of it or of anything it entails. It's a
curious thing that a man of my make-up is afraid of being ridiculed or
being given the cold shoulder, but he's not afraid to die."

Though he was looking straight at her, he was too deeply engrossed in
his own thoughts to see how proudly her head went up, or to note the
flash of splendid light in which her glance enveloped him.

"I was all ready to