er in
a bad French comedy was not for him. Jones would just as soon have
thought of kissing another man's wife as of standing on his head in the
middle of Broadway.

To personate another man and to kiss the other man's wife under that
disguise would have seemed to him the meanest act any two-legged
creature could perform.

And he had just done it. And the other man's wife had--heu! his face
still burned.

She had done it because of his deception.

He found himself suddenly face to face with the barrier that Fate had
been cunningly constructing and had now placed straight before him.

There was no getting over it or under it, he would have to declare his
position _at once_--and what a position to declare!

She loved Rochester.

All at once that terrific fact appeared before him in its true
proportions and its true meaning.

She loved Rochester.

He had to tell her the truth. Yet to tell her the truth he would have to
tell her that the man she loved was dead.

Then she would want proofs.

He would have to bring up the Savoy Hotel people, fetch folk from
America--disinter Rochester. Horror! He had never thought of that. What
had become of Rochester? Up to this he had never thought once of what
had become of the mortal remains of the defunct jester, nor had he cared
a button--why should he?

But the woman who loved Rochester would care. And he, Jones, would
become in her eyes a ghoul, a monstrosity, a horror.

He felt a tinge of that feeling towards himself now. Up to this
Rochester had been for him a mechanical figure, an abstraction, but the
fact of this woman's love had suddenly converted the abstraction into a
human being.

He could not possibly tell her that he had left the remains of this
human being, this man she loved, in the hands of unknown strangers,
callously, as though it were the remains of an animal.

He could tell her nothing.

The game was up, he would have to quit. Either that, or to continue the
masquerade which was impossible; or to tell her all, which was equally
impossible.

Yet to quit would be to hit her cruelly. She loved Rochester.

Rochester, despite all his wickedness, frivolity, shiftlessness and
general unworthiness--or perhaps because of these things--had been able
to make this woman love him, take his part against his family and return
to him.

To go away and leave her now would be the cruelest act. Cruel to her and
just as cruel to himself, fascinated and held by h