“Wait a minute,” Lot said.

“Well,” returned Burr, impatiently.

Lot got up, went over to the mantel-shelf, and stood there a minute, leaning against it, his face hidden.  When he looked at Burr again he was so white that his cousin started.  “Are you sick?” he cried, with harsh concern.

Lot smiled with stiff lips.  “Only with the life-sickness that smites the child when it enters the world, and makes it weep with its first breath,” he answered.

“If you want to say anything to me, Lot, talk like a man, and not a book,” Burr cried out, with another step towards the door; and yet he spoke kindly enough, for there was something in his cousin’s face which aroused his pity.

“It is not—­” began Lot, and stopped, and caught his breath.  Burr watched him half alarmed; he looked in mortal agony.  Lot clutched the carven edge of the mantel-shelf, then loosened his fingers.  “If,” he said, brokenly, looking at Burr with the eyes of one who awaits a mortal blow, “you want—­Madelon—­it is not—­too late.  She—­I know how she feels—­towards you.”

Burr turned white, as he stared at him.  “She—­she was going to marry you!” he said with a sneer.

“Do—­you know why?”

Burr shook his head, still staring at his cousin.

“It was the price of—­your—­acquittal.”

Burr did not move his eyes from Lot’s face.  He looked as if he were reading something there writ in startling characters, against which his whole soul leaped up in incredulity.  “My God, I see!” he groaned out slowly, at length.  And then he said, sharply, “But—­you were going to marry her.  Why did you give her up?”

“I loved her,” Lot said, simply.  His white face worked.

“But now—­you—­ask me to—­”

“I love her!” Lot said again, with a gasp.

Burr strode forward, quite up to his cousin, and grasped his hand warmly for the first time in his life.  “Before the Lord, Lot,” he said, huskily, “’twas you, and not me, she should have fancied in the first of it.”

“It is neither you nor me, nor any other man, that she will ever love as he is,” Lot said, shortly, straightening himself, for jealousy stung him hard.

“What do you mean?”

“Woman reverses creation.  She is a sublimated particle of a man, and she builds a god from her own superstructure, and clothes him with any image whom she chooses.  She chose yours.  Live up to her thought of you, if you can.”

Burr dropped his cousin’s hand, and surveyed him with that impatient wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic speech.  “There’s no question of my living up to the thought of any woman’s but my wife’s,” he said, bitterly, and turned away.

“There’s no knowing to what stature even a Dorothy Fair may raise a man in her mind.  You may not be able to grow to that.”

“It is all I shall attempt.”

Then Lot spoke again, in that short-breathed voice of his, straining between the syllables.  “Be sure—­that you do—­what—­you will not—­regret.  Honor is not—­always what we—­think it.”