hat Westwood's death sentence had been commuted to one of imprisonment
for life. Did that make things any better? Hubert thought that it did.
And his heart failed him--he could not bear the thought of public
disgrace, condemnation, punishment. He knew himself to be a coward and a
villain, and yet he could not bring himself to tell the truth. When Miss
Vane accused him of heartlessness because he explained his pallor by
saying that he had spent the previous evening with friends, he was in
reality suffering from the depression consequent on several nights of
sleepless agony of mind. He was not silent for his own sake alone. He
was afraid of implicating Flossy, the woman to whom Sydney Vane had
proposed love, and about whom he had quarrelled with her brother. It was
Flossy's share in the matter that sealed his lips; and from the moment
of his conversation with Florence at the library window his mind was
made up. He had gone too far to draw back--Andrew Westwood must bear his
fate. Lifelong imprisonment scarcely seemed more terrible to Hubert
Lepel just then than the life sentence of remorse which he had brought
on his own head.

Since those days his heart had grown harder. He had resolved to
forget--to fight down the secret consciousness of guilt which pursued
him night and day--to live his own life, in spite of the haunting sense
that he had sacrificed all that was good and noble in himself, all that
really made life worth having. He was striving hard, as he said to
Florence, to cast the past behind him, to live as if he were what he had
been before he bore about with him the shadow of a crime.

But, in the very first endeavor which Hubert Lepel made to act as if the
past were done away with, he was brought face to face with it again, and
made to feel as he had seldom felt before, that he had wronged not only
those who were dead, but those who were living--for he had let Florence
become the wife of a man, the mother of a child, whom she did not love,
and he had left the girl whom his own hand had made fatherless to
Florence's care. As to Westwood's child, she was in a worse case than
Enid Vane, for she was not only orphaned but homeless perhaps, and lost
to all that was good and pure.

He thought of this as he stood in the fir-wood, surveying the scene
where the suddenly-improvised duel had taken place; and, as the memory
of it grew upon him, he cast himself down on the mossy ground and sobbed
aloud. He had not shed a t