“I concede you to have been unwise—­” he hoarsely began.

About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but the air of this new day seemed raw and chill.

Then Rosamund came through the opening in the hedge.  “Now, choose,” she said; “the woman offers life and high place and wealth, and it may be, a greater love than I am capable of giving you.  I offer a dishonorable death within the moment.”

And again, with that peculiar and imperious gesture, the man flung back his head, and he laughed.  Said Gregory Darrell: 

“I am I! and I will so to live that I may face without shame not only God, but also my own scrutiny.”  He wheeled upon the Queen and spoke henceforward very leisurely.  “I love you; all my life long I have loved you, Ysabeau, and even now I love you:  and you, too, dear Rosamund, I love, though with a difference.  And every fibre of my being lusts for the power that you would give me, Ysabeau, and for the good which I would do with it in the England which I or blustering Roger Mortimer must rule; as every fibre of my being lusts for the man that I would be could I choose death without debate.  And I think also of the man that you would make of me, my Rosamund.

“The man!  And what is this man, this Gregory Darrell, that his welfare should be considered?—­an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts!  This much I know, at bottom.

“Yet more clearly do I perceive that this same man, like all his fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon many wise and evil counsellors.  He must measure, to a hair’s-breadth, every content of the world by means of a bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in his skull, a sponge which is ungeared by the first cup of wine and ruined by the touch of his own finger.  He must appraise all that he judges with no better instruments than two bits of colored jelly, with a bungling makeshift so maladroit that the nearest horologer’s apprentice could have devised a more accurate device.  In fine, each man is under penalty condemned to compute eternity with false weights, to estimate infinity with a yard-stick:  and he very often does it, and chooses his own death without debate.  For though, ’If then I do that which I would not I consent unto the law,’ saith even an Apostle; yet a braver Pagan answers him, ’Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine than the things which cause the various effects and, as it were, pull thee by the strings.’

“There lies the choice which every man must face,—­whether rationally, as his reason goes, to accept his own limitations and make the best of his allotted prison-yard? or stupendously to play the fool and swear even to himself (while his own judgment shrieks and proves a flat denial), that he is at will omnipotent?  You have chosen long ago, my poor proud Ysabeau; and I choose now, and differently:  for poltroon that I am! being now in a cold drench of terror, I steadfastly protest I am not very much afraid, and I choose death without any more debate.”