illusion on this
particular point. Oh, don't worry. I shall always be kind to him; I
sha'n't bait him. Only, he'll be an interesting specimen for me to
observe. But ship that girl east as soon as you can."

"Why?"

McClintock put a hand on the doctor's shoulder. "Because she's a
fire-opal, and to the world at large they bring bad luck."

"Rot! Mac, what do you suppose the natives used to call her? The
Dawn Pearl!"

McClintock wagged his Scotch head negatively. He knew what he knew.

* * * * *

Spurlock possessed that extraordinary condition of the mind which
is called New England conscience. Buried under various ancestral
sixteenths, smothered under modern thought, liberty of action and
bewildering variety of flesh-pots, it was still alive to the extent
that it needed only his present state to resuscitate it in all its
peculiar force. The Protestant Flagellant, who whipped his soul
rather than his body, who made self-denial the rack and the boot,
who believed that on Sunday it was sacrilegious to smile,
blasphemous to laugh! Spurlock had gone back spiritually three
hundred years. In the matter of his conscience he was primitive;
and for an educated man to become primitive is to become something
of a child.

From midnight until morning he was now left alone. He had
sufficient strength to wait upon himself. During the previous night
he had been restless; and in the lonely dragging hours his thoughts
had raced in an endless circle--action without progress. He was
reaching wearily for some kind of buffer to his harrying
conscience. He thought rationally; that is to say, he thought
clearly, as a child thinks clearly. The primitive superstition of
his Puritan forbears was his; and before this the buckler of his
education disintegrated. The idea of Ruth as a talisman against
misfortune--which he now recognized as a sick man's idea--faded as
his appreciation of the absurd reasserted itself. But in its
stead--toward morning--there appeared another idea which appealed to
him as sublime, appealed to the primitive conscience, to his
artistic sense of the drama, to the poet and the novelist in him. He
was and always would be dramatizing his emotions; perpetually he
would be confounding his actual with his imaginary self.

To surrender himself to the law, to face trial and imprisonment,
was out of the question. Let the law put its hand on his
shoulder--if it could! But at present he was at l