life.  But, in your suffering you must rejoice:  the triumph is that your mind hates that old life as greatly as your soul hates it.  You are as good as if you had never been the wild fellow—­yes, the wicked fellow—­that you were.  For a man who shakes off his sin is clean; he stands as pure as if he had never sinned.  But though his emancipation can be so perfect, there is a law that he cannot escape from the result of all the bad and foolish things he has done, for every act, every breath you draw, is immortal, and each has a consequence that is never ending.  And so, now, though you are purified, the suffering from these old actions is here, and you must abide it.  Ah, but that is a little thing, nothing!—­that suffering—­ compared to what you have gained, for you have gained your own soul!”

The desperate young man on the couch answered only with the sobbing of a broken-hearted child.

I came back to my pavilion after midnight, but I did not sleep, though I lay upon my bed until dawn.  Then I went for a long, hard walk, breakfasted at Dives, and begged a ride back to Madame Brossard’s in a peasant’s cart which was going that way.

I found George Ward waiting for me on the little veranda of the pavilion, looking handsomer and more prosperously distinguished and distinguishedly prosperous and generally well-conditioned than ever—­as I told him.

“I have some news for you,” he said after the hearty greeting—­“an announcement, in fact.”

“Wait!” I glanced at the interested attitude of Mr. Earl Percy, who was breakfasting at a table significantly near the gallery steps, and led the way into the pavilion.  “You may as well not tell it in the hearing of that young man,” I said, when the door was closed.  “He is eccentric.”

“So I gathered,” returned Ward, smiling, “from his attire.  But it really wouldn’t matter who heard it.  Elizabeth’s going to marry Cresson Ingle.”

“That is the news—­the announcement—­you spoke of?”

“Yes, that is it.”

To save my life I could not have told at that moment what else I had expected, or feared, that he might say, but certainly I took a deep breath of relief.  “I am very glad,” I said.  “It should be a happy alliance.”

“On the whole, I think it will be,” he returned thoughtfully.  “Ingle’s done his share of hard living, and I once had a notion”—­he glanced smiling at me—­“well, I dare say you know my notion.  But it is a good match for Elizabeth and not without advantages on many counts.  You see, it’s time I married, myself; she feels that very strongly and I think her decision to accept Ingle is partly due to her wish to make all clear for a new mistress of my household,—­though that’s putting it in a rather grandiloquent way.”  He laughed.  “And as you probably guess, I have an idea that some such arrangement might be somewhere on the wings of the wind on its way to me, before long.”

He laughed again, but I did not, and noting my silence he turned upon me a more scrutinising look than he had yet given me, and said: