inly this was the thing that was stronger
than he. There was no answer. There was no way out.

Guilty! Guilty as Rafe Gadbeau!

But Rafe Gadbeau had found a way out. He was not guilty any more.
Cynthe had said so. He had gotten past that wall of guilt somehow. He
had merely come through the fire and thrown himself at a man's feet
and had his guilt wiped away. What was there in that uncanny thing
they called confession, that a man, guilty, guilty as--as Rafe
Gadbeau, could come to another man, and, by the saying of a few words,
turn over and face death feeling that his guilt was wiped away?

It was a delusion, of course. The saying of words could never wipe
away Rafe Gadbeau's guilt, any more than it could take away this guilt
from Jeffrey Whiting. It was a delusion, yes. But Rafe Gadbeau
_believed_ it! Cynthe believed it! And Cynthe was no fool. _Ruth_
believed it!

It was a delusion, yes. But--_What_ a delusion! What a magnificent,
soul-stirring delusion! A delusion that could lift Rafe Gadbeau out of
the misery of his guilt, that carried the souls of millions of guilty
people through all the world up out of the depths of their crimes to a
confidence of relief and freedom!

Then the soul of Jeffrey Whiting went down into the abyss of
despairing loneliness. It trod the dark ways in which there was no
guidance. It did not look up, for it knew not to whom or to what it
might appeal. It travelled an endless round of memory, from cause to
effect and back again to cause, looking for the single act, or
thought, that must have been the starting point, that must have held
the germ of his guilt.

Somewhere there must have been a beginning. He knew that he was not in
any particular a different person, capable of anything different,
likely to anything different, that morning on Bald Mountain from what
he had been on any other morning since he had become a man. There was
never a time, so far as he could see, when he would not have been
ready to do the thing which he was ready to do that morning--given the
circumstances. Nor had he changed in any way since that morning. What
had been essentially his act, his thought, a part of him, that morning
was just as much a part of him, was himself, in fact, this minute.
There was no thing in the succession of incidents to which he could
point and say: That was not I who did that: I did not mean that: I am
sorry I did that. Nor would there ever be a time when he could say any
of these