“And you’ve decided in your own favor?”

“So far.  I’ve been actuated by the instinct of self-preservation.”

“And are you going to persist in it?”

“That’s for you to tell me.  But I should like to remind you first of this, that if I don’t—­I go.”

“And what if—­if I went with you?”

“You couldn’t.  The journey would be too long.”

“But you needn’t go so far if I’m there.”

“I couldn’t take you with me.  You must understand that.  I once knew an American girl who married a man who cheated at cards, and buried herself alive with him.  I wouldn’t let a woman do that for me.”

“But if she wanted to?”

“In that case she ought to be protected from herself.  There’s no use in ruining two lives where one will do.”

“There’s such a thing as losing your life to find it.”

“If so, it’s something for me to do—­alone.”

“Isn’t it a kind of moral cowardice to say that?”

“I don’t think so.  To me it seems only looking things squarely in the face.  I’m not the sort of man for whom there’s any possibility of beginning life anew.  A man like me can’t live things down.  When once, by his own confession, he has lost his honor, there’s no rehabilitation that can make him a man again.  Like Cain, he has got to go out from the presence of the Lord; only, unlike Cain, there’s no land of Nod waiting to receive him.  There’s no place for him anywhere on earth.  A few years ago, when I was motoring in the Black Forest with the d’Aubignys, we dropped into a little hole of an inn as nearly out of the world as anything could be.  As we approached the door a man got up from a bench and shambled away.  When he had got to what he considered a safe distance he turned to look at us.  I knew him.  It was Jacques de la Tour de Lorme.”

“Really?”

“The poor wretch had hidden himself in that God-forsaken spot, where he supposed no one would be able to track him down; but we had done it.  I’ve never forgotten his weary gait or the woe-begone look in his eyes.  It is what would come to me if I waited for it.”

“I don’t see why.  There’s no similarity between the cases.  Jacques de La Tour de Lorme did wrong he never could put right.  You’d be doing the very thing he found impossible.”  He shook his head.  “It wouldn’t make any difference in my world.  Nobody there would think of the right or the wrong; they’d only consider what I’d owned to.  It’s the confession that would ruin me.”

“Surely you exaggerate.  You could do it quietly.  No one need know—­outside Derek Pruyn and two or three more of us.”

“I don’t do things in that way,” he said, with an odd return of his old-time pride.  “If I put the woman right, it shall be in the eyes of the world.  I don’t ask to have things made easy for me.  If I do it at all, I shall do it thoroughly.  I’m not afraid of it or of anything it entails.  It’s a curious thing that a man of my make-up is afraid of being ridiculed or being given the cold shoulder, but he’s not afraid to die.”