“What!  What do you know about my great grandfather?  Do you know who I am?”

“I do.  You are John Massey, old John’s grandson, the chap I told you once was dead and decently buried.  I hoped it was true at the time but it wasn’t a week before I knew it was a lie.  I found out John Massey was alive and that he was going under the name of Dick Carson.  Do you wonder I hated you?”

Dick sat down, his face white.  He looked and was utterly dazed.

“I don’t understand,” he said.  “Do you mind explaining?  It—­it is a little hard to get all at once.”

And then Alan Massey told the story that no living being save himself knew.  He spared himself nothing, apologised for nothing, expressed no regret, asked for no palliation of judgment, forgiveness or even understanding.  Quietly, apparently without emotion, he gave back to the other man the birthright he had robbed him of by his selfish and dishonorable connivance with a wicked old man now beyond the power of any vengeance or penalty.  Dick Carson was no longer nameless but as he listened tensely to his cousin’s revelations he almost found it in his heart to wish he were.  It was too terrible to have won his name at such a cost.  As he listened, watching Alan’s eyes burn in the dusk in strange contrast to his cool, liquid, studiously tranquil voice, Dick remembered a line Alan himself had read him only the other day, “Hell, the shadow of a soul on fire,” the Persian phrased it.  Watching, Dick Carson saw before him a sadder thing, a soul which had once been on fire and was now but gray ashes.  The flame had blazed up, scorched and blackened its path.  It was over now, burnt out.  At thirty-three Alan Massey was through, had lived his life, had given up.  The younger man saw this with a pang which had no reactive thought of self, only compassion for the other.

“That is all, I think,” said Alan at last.  “I have all the proofs of your identity with me.  I never could destroy them somehow though I have meant to over and over again.  On the same principle I suppose that the sinning monk sears the sign of the cross on his breast though he makes no outward confession to the world and means to make none.  I never meant to make mine.  I don’t know why I am doing it now.  Or rather I do.  I couldn’t marry Tony with this thing between us.  I tried to think I could, that I’d made up to you by saving your life, that I was free to take my happiness with her because I loved her and she loved me.  And she does love me.  She wrote me yesterday she would marry me whenever I wished.  I could have had her.  But I couldn’t take her that way.  I couldn’t have made her happy.  She would have read the thing in my soul.  She is too clean and honest and true herself not to feel the presence of the other thing when it came near her.  I have tried to tell myself love was enough, that it would make up to her for the rest.  It isn’t enough.  You can’t build life or happiness except on the quarry stuff they keep on Holiday Hill, right, honor, decency.  You know that.  Tony forgave my past.  I believe she is generous enough to forgive even this and go on with me.  But I shan’t ask her.  I won’t let her.  I—­I’ve given her up with the rest.”