“Garry may really have been a hypocrite, yet wasn’t Lilienfeld a hypocrite, too, when he spoke openly of Ingigerd Hahlstroem’s honour and chastity?  I looked up in alarm, and I saw a grin glide like a malicious shadow over the rows of reporters.  Doesn’t falsehood blossom everywhere?  Doesn’t hypocrisy flourish equally on each side of every contest?  Isn’t it a matter generally taken for granted?”

Frederick, as always, was feeling very comfortable in Miss Burns’s company.  Her presence always gave him, spiritually speaking, a sense of neatness and order.  A man could tell her everything, and her replies straightened things out, instead of muddling them, steadied things and gave them a mooring, instead of tossing them about tempestuously.  But he was not so well satisfied by her manner as usually, she not seeming sufficiently pleased with his release.  He did not know whether he should attribute this to lack of sympathy or to secret doubts.

“I came to you, Miss Burns, because I do not know anybody to whom I would rather speak of this new phase of my life.  Tell me frankly, was I right in doing what I did, and do you understand how a man feels when he is no longer in the chains of a senseless passion?”

“Perhaps I do,” said Miss Burns, “but”—­

“But what?”

Miss Burns did not reply.

“What you mean is, you cannot be certain of the convalescence of a man like myself.  But I assure you, I will never sit in an audience watching that girl publicly expose her body.  Still less likely am I to follow her to the four corners of the globe, through all the music-halls in the world.  I am rid of her!  I am free!  I will prove to you that I am.”

“If you were to prove it to yourself, it might be of some value to you,” said Miss Burns.

But he much preferred to prove it to her.

“Perhaps you think it is a whim in me or a piece of foolishness.  Yet, the way I am constituted, it is practically impossible for me to do anything for my sake alone.  Your sympathy would act as a stimulus to keep me to my resolution.”  He drew from his pocket a letter from Peter Schmidt, saying that near Meriden there was a frame house that would be suitable for Frederick.  Evidently his plan to retire to rural solitude was by no means a recent one.  “When I come to myself in the quiet of the country, and I have reason to hope I will come to myself, you will hear from me.  From time to time the world learns of a man of about thirty who suddenly disappears, leaving his family, his wife and his children in ignorance of his whereabouts.  Sometimes he is a statesman, sometimes a young professor in a university, sometimes a mayor in good standing with all the citizens of his town, sometimes a rich business man enjoying the respect of the community.  He leaves most unceremoniously, without concerning himself for the affairs of importance, even of extreme importance, that he may have to attend to the next