“I wonder if you appreciate your gift as you should?—­to be able to make a man over in the moral part of him with the tips of your fingers?  The devil is exorcised, for the moment, and I can tell you all about it now, if you care to know.”

“Of course I care,” she assented.

“Well, to begin with, I’m no better than I have been; a little less despicable than you’ve been thinking me, perhaps, but more wicked.  I’ve hated these two men ever since I was old enough to know how; and to get square with them, I haven’t scrupled to sink to their level.  The smash at Gordonia is my smash, I’m responsible for everything that has happened.”

“I know it,” she said.  “Mr. Norman has told me.”

“Looking it all over, I don’t see that there is much to choose between me and the men I’ve been hunting down.  They went after the things they needed, without much compunction for other people; and so did I. On the night of the—­on the night when you called to me and I wouldn’t answer, I was going down to rub it in; to tell them they were in the hole and that I had put them there.  I met a man at the gate who told me what Japheth told you.  It made a devil of me, Ardea.  I took the man’s gun and followed Vincent around the yard.  I meant to kill him.”

She nodded complete intelligence.

“The provocation was very great,” she said evenly.  “Why didn’t you do it, Tom?”

“Now you’ve cornered me:  I don’t know why I didn’t.  I had only to walk away and let him alone when the time came.  The slag-spilling would have settled him.  But I couldn’t do it.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” she agreed convincingly.  “God wouldn’t let you.”

“He lets other men commit murder; one a day, or such a matter.”

“Not one of those who have named His name, Tom—­as you have.”

He shook his head slowly.  “I wish that appealed to me, as it ought.  But it doesn’t.  Where is the proof?”

She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him.

“Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?”

“I have asked it,” he insisted stubbornly.  “You mustn’t take anything for granted.  Just at that moment I couldn’t kill a man; but that is all the difference.  I’ve done what I meant to do, or most of it.”

She was holding him steadily with her eyes.  “Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?”

He frowned up at her.

“I don’t know.  Now that it’s all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I’ll admit that much.  I’m free; ’free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,’ as David put it when he had sounded all the depths.  Is that being sorry?”

“No—­I don’t know,” she confessed.

He was smiling now.

“You think I ought to go back to first principles:  get down on my knees and agonize over it?  Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea.  But I can’t.  The mill won’t grind with the water that has passed.”