his chair and looked at his watch. "She may live two
hours," he thought. "Possibly three. It is only twelve. There is plenty
of time."

The room grew as still as the mountain-top whence he had that day
returned. He attempted to read, but could not. The sense of supreme
power filled his brain. He was the gigantic factor in the fates of four.

Then Circumstance, the outwardly wayward, the ruthlessly sequential,
played him an ugly trick. His eyes, glancing idly about the room, were
arrested by a big old-fashioned rocking-chair. There was something
familiar about it. Soon he remembered that it resembled one in which his
mother used to sit. She had been an invalid, and the most sinless and
unworldly woman he had ever known. He recalled, with a touch of the old
impatience, how she had irritated his active, aspiring, essentially
modern mind with her cast-iron precepts of right and wrong. Her
conscience flagellated her, and she had striven to develop her son's to
the goodly proportion of her own. As he was naturally a truthful and
upright boy, he resented her homilies mightily. "Conscience," he once
broke out impatiently, "has made more women bores, more men failures,
than any ten vices in the rogues' calendar."

She had looked in pale horror, and taken refuge in an axiom: "Conscience
makes cowards of us all."

He moved his head with involuntary pride. The greatest achievement of
civilization was the triumph of the intellect over inherited
impressions. Every normal man was conscientious by instinct, however he
might outrage the sturdy little judge clinging tenaciously to his bench
in the victim's brain. It was only when the brain grew big with
knowledge and the will clasped it with fingers of steel that the little
judge was throttled, then cast out.

Conscience. What was it like? The doctor had forgotten. He had never
committed a murder nor a dishonorable act. Had the impulse of either
been in him, his cleverness would have put it aside with a smile of
scorn. He had never scrupled to thrust from his path whoever or whatever
stood in his way, and had stridden on without a backward glance. His
profession had involved many experiments that would have made quick
havoc of even the ordinary man's conscience.

Conscience. An awkward guest for an unsuspected murderer; for the
groundling whose heredity had not been conquered by brain. Fancy being
pursued by the spectre of the victim!

The woman on the bed gave a start and groan