hich he seemed almost to have been
waited for. Then, irrelevantly perhaps, there shot across his memory the
phrases used by Rodney Temple less than an hour ago:

"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither. But,"
he added, slowly, "some _do_ call it God."

IV

Closing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute,
with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the
woodwork. He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and
to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.

"The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill," he said to
himself. "That's all over--all over and done with. Now!"

It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an
impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever
since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might
not be able to restore all the money he had "borrowed" from the
properties in his trust. Having descried it from a long way off, he knew
that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon. There were
many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all. Times
might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he
expected from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die. If none of these
things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make
money in big strokes and "square himself" without any one ever being
the wiser. He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them,
in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the
deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves. Fortune had generally
favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.

So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his
recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to
his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove
equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to
inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be
unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly
exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his
own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from
touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to
touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own acco