in the clutch of a mighty
desire. For a second he had swayed under the temptation. He had been
ready to risk everything, because for a heart-beat or two nothing else
seemed to matter. In his madness, he had even dared think that
delicate, sensitive mouth trembled a like desire.

Even here in the dark, alone, something of the same desire returned.
He began to pace the room.

How she would have hated him had he yielded to that impulse! He
shuddered as he pictured the look of horror that would have leaped into
her dark eyes. Then she would have shrunk away frightened, and her
eyes would have grown cold--those eyes that had only so lately warmed
at all. Her face would have turned to marble--the face that only so
lately had relaxed.

She trusted him--trusted him to the extent of being willing to marry
him to save herself from the very danger with which he had threatened
her. Except that at the last moment he had resisted, he was no better
than Hamilton.

In her despair she had cried, "Why won't they let me alone?" And he
had urged her to come with him, so that she might be let alone. He was
to be merely her _camarade de voyage_--her big brother. Then, in less
than twelve hours, he had become like the others. He felt unfit to
remain in the next room to her--unfit to greet her in the morning. In
an agony of remorse, he clenched his fists.

He drew himself up shortly. A new question leaped to his brain. Was
this, then, love? The thought brought both solace and fresh terror.
It gave him at least some justification for his moment of temptation;
but it also brought vividly before him countless new dangers. If this
were love, then he must face day after day of this sort of thing. Then
he would be at the mercy of a passion that must inevitably lead him
either to Hamilton's plight or to Chic Warren's equally unenviable
position. Each man, in his own way, paid the cost: Hamilton, mad at
Maxim's; Chic pacing the floor, with beaded brow, at night. With these
two examples before him, surely he should have learned his lesson.
Against them he could place his own normal life--ten years of it
without a single hour such as these hours through which he was now
living.

That was because he had kept steady. Ambition, love, drunkenness,
gluttony--these were all excesses. His own father had desired mightily
to be governor of a State, and it had killed him; his grandfather had
died amassing the Covington fortune; he had