“Herbert Strange goes back into the nothingness out of which he was born the minute I become Norrie Ford again.”

“But you can’t do that!”

She drew herself up hastily, with a gasp.

“It’s exactly what I mean to do.”  He spoke very slowly “I’m going to be a free man, and my own master, even if it leads me where—­where they meant to put me when you snatched me away.  I’m going back to my fellow-men, to the body corporate—­”

She rose in agitation, and drew back from him toward the chimney-piece.  “So that if—­if anything happens,” she said, “I shall have driven you to it.  That’s how you get your revenge.”

“Not at all.  I’m not coming to this decision suddenly, or in a spirit of revenge, in any way.”  He followed her, standing near her, on the hearth-rug.  “I can truthfully say,” he went on in his slow, explanatory fashion, “that there’s been no time, since the minute I made my first dash for liberty, when I haven’t known, in the bottom of my heart, what a good thing it would have been if I hadn’t done it.  I’ve come to see—­I’ve had to—–­ that the death-chair would have been better, with self-respect, than freedom to go and come, with the necessity to gag every one, every minute of the day, and every day in the year, and all the time, with lies.  If that seems far-fetched to you—­”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Well, if it did you’d see it wasn’t, if you were in my place for a month.  I didn’t mind it so much at first.  I stood it by day and just suffered by night—­till the Jarrotts began to be so kind to me, and I came to New York—­and—­and—­and Evie!”

“I’m sorry I’ve spoken to you as I have,” she said, hastily.  “If I’d known you felt like that—­”

“You were quite right.  I always understood that.  But I can’t go on with it.  If Evie marries me now, it shall be knowing who I am.”

“You don’t mean that you could possibly tell her?”

“I’m going to tell every one.”

She stifled a little cry.  “Then it will be my doing!”

“It will be your doing—­up to a point.  But it will be something for you to be proud of, not to regret.  You’ve only brought my mistake so clearly before me that even I can’t stand it—­when I’ve stood so much.  You ask me to turn my back on Evie and sneak away.  You’ve got the right to command, and there’s nothing for me but to obey you.  But I can’t help seeing the sort of life that would be left to me after I’d carried out your orders.  It wouldn’t only be the loss of Evie—­I may lose her in any case—­it would be the loss of everything within myself that’s enabled me hitherto merely to hold up my head—­and bluff.”

“I might withdraw what I’ve just asked you to do.  Perhaps we could find some other way.”

He laughed with grim lightness.

“You’re weakening.  That’s not like you.  And it wouldn’t do any good now.  Even if we did patch up some other scheme, there would still remain what you talked about a minute ago—­the loyalty that every human being owes to every other.”