mutable, he could have found
any other solution himself. Honor has many arbitrary inflections, and
Zeal's act, being wholly abominable, there must seem, in his code, to be
no place for him among men. To walk among them unscathed, punished only
by a conscience that time would inevitably dull, and the loss of a small
fortune that his promised wife would more than replace, while some
passionate creature without powerful friends or money for blackmail went
to the noose, was an outrage abroad in the secret regions of the spirit
even if it made no assault upon public standards. He deserved
extinction, one way or another, and it would be almost as great an
outrage were he to cover his family with his own disgrace. Certain men
might, after such a lesson, live on to devote their lives to repentance
and beneficent works, but not Zeal; and Gwynne had no great respect for
a character made over after some terrifying explosion among its baser
parts. And the question would always remain if the highest honor would
not have commanded confession.

He made a deliberate effort to put himself in Zeal's place, and after
several failures accomplished the feat. He was willing to believe that
his first impulse would have been to destroy himself, not so much
through fear as through a blind sense of atonement, for when he
endeavored to argue that the crime belonged to the law and the public,
he swore at himself for a prig. Either way was suicide, and if the more
deliberate might damn a man's soul, no doubt he deserved nothing less,
and at least he had done his duty by his family and his class. Gwynne
had in the base of his character a puritanical stratum by no means mined
as yet, but with too many outcroppings to have been overlooked. But the
very strength it gave him served to confuse the simplicity of the
religious instinct; and duty, like the code of honor, endures many
interpretations in complex minds. He was quite sure that ultimately he
would have decided with his cold intelligence; and he was equally sure
that if he had doggedly determined to conquer life and be conquered by
nothing, that the best part of his mental existence would have gone into
the grave with his ideals.

Although there was still some confusion in his mind, he kept it out of
his words, and as he drove home from the station he was sanguine enough
to hope that he had at least dissuaded Zeal from precipitancy; for his
cousin, flippant, cynical, appeared to be quite his usu