tage by declaring
yourself, before Livingstone can bring suit against you?"

"There will be no suit," he answered positively. "I hold the winning
cards in this game. There is no advantage in my returning to a life
which for me holds nothing but horror. Do you not see, Monsignor, that
the same reasons which sent me out of it hold good to keep me out of
it?"

"Very true," said Monsignor reluctantly, as he viewed the situation.

"And new reasons, not to be controverted, have sprung up around Arthur
Dillon. For Horace Endicott there is nothing in that old life but public
disgrace. Do you know that I hate that fat fool, that wretched cuckold
who had not sense enough to discover what the uninterested knew about
that woman? I would not wear his name, nor go back to his circle, if the
man and woman were dead, and the secret buried forever."

"He was young and innocent," said the priest with a pitiful glance at
Arthur.

"And selfish and sensual too. I despise him. He would never have been
more than an empty-headed pleasure-seeker. With that wife he could have
become anything you please. The best thing he did was his flight into
everlasting obscurity, and that he owed to the simple, upright,
strong-hearted woman who nourished him in his despair. Monsignor," and
he laid his firm hand on the knee of the priest and looked at him with
terrible eyes, "I would choose death rather than go back to what I was.
I shall never go back. I get hot with shame when I think of the part an
Endicott played as Sonia Westfield's fool."

"And the reason not to be controverted?"

"In what a position my departure would leave my mother. Have you thought
of that? After all her kindness, her real affection, as if I had been
her own son. She thinks now that I am her son, and I feel that she is my
mother. And what would induce me to expose her to the public gaze as the
chief victim, or the chief plotter in a fraud? If it had to be done, I
would wait in any event until my mother was dead. But beyond all these
minor reasons is one that overshadows everything. I am Arthur Dillon.
That other man is not only dead, he is as unreal to me as the hero of
any book I read in my boyhood. It was hard to give up the old
personality; to give up what I am now would be impossible. I am what I
seem. I feel, think, speak, dream Arthur Dillon. The roots would bleed
if I were to transplant myself. I found my career among your people, and
the meaning of life. There is no