“But, man, this chap hasn’t fallen soft.”

“Ay, but he will.  And here’s the proof.  You and the girl have made it soft for him, and I’m going to make it soft for him.  But what I do is based upon the fact that he is one of those individuals who are conscience-driven.  Conscience drove him to this side of the world, to this bed.  It drives him to my island, where I can study him to my heart’s content.  He believes that he is leaving this conscience behind; and I want to watch his disillusion on this particular point.  Oh, don’t worry.  I shall always be kind to him; I sha’n’t bait him.  Only, he’ll be an interesting specimen for me to observe.  But ship that girl east as soon as you can.”

“Why?”

McClintock put a hand on the doctor’s shoulder.  “Because she’s a fire-opal, and to the world at large they bring bad luck.”

“Rot!  Mac, what do you suppose the natives used to call her?  The Dawn Pearl!”

McClintock wagged his Scotch head negatively.  He knew what he knew.

* * * * *

Spurlock possessed that extraordinary condition of the mind which is called New England conscience.  Buried under various ancestral sixteenths, smothered under modern thought, liberty of action and bewildering variety of flesh-pots, it was still alive to the extent that it needed only his present state to resuscitate it in all its peculiar force.  The Protestant Flagellant, who whipped his soul rather than his body, who made self-denial the rack and the boot, who believed that on Sunday it was sacrilegious to smile, blasphemous to laugh!  Spurlock had gone back spiritually three hundred years.  In the matter of his conscience he was primitive; and for an educated man to become primitive is to become something of a child.

From midnight until morning he was now left alone.  He had sufficient strength to wait upon himself.  During the previous night he had been restless; and in the lonely dragging hours his thoughts had raced in an endless circle—­action without progress.  He was reaching wearily for some kind of buffer to his harrying conscience.  He thought rationally; that is to say, he thought clearly, as a child thinks clearly.  The primitive superstition of his Puritan forbears was his; and before this the buckler of his education disintegrated.  The idea of Ruth as a talisman against misfortune—­which he now recognized as a sick man’s idea—­faded as his appreciation of the absurd reasserted itself.  But in its stead—­toward morning—­there appeared another idea which appealed to him as sublime, appealed to the primitive conscience, to his artistic sense of the drama, to the poet and the novelist in him.  He was and always would be dramatizing his emotions; perpetually he would be confounding his actual with his imaginary self.

To surrender himself to the law, to face trial and imprisonment, was out of the question.  Let the law put its hand on his shoulder—­if it could!  But at present he was at liberty, and he purposed to remain in that state.  His conscience never told him to go back and take his punishment; it tortured him only in regard to the deed itself.  He had tossed an honoured name into the mire; he required no prison bars to accentuate this misery.