m; who
had been from the first a discreet friend, a gentleman,--a Christian
gentleman, if there was such a sort of gentleman apart from all others.
Who mattered? The Seigneur, whom he had never seen before, yet who had
showed that day a brusque sympathy, a gruff belief in him? Who mattered?

Above all, Rosalie mattered. To escape, to go from Rosalie's presence
by a dark way, as it were, like a thief in the night--was that possible?
His escape would work upon her mind. She would first wonder, then doubt,
and then believe at last that he was a common criminal. She was the one
who mattered in that thought of escape escape to some other parish, to
some other province, to some other country--to some other world!

To some other world? He looked at a little bottle he held in the palm of
his hand.

A hand held aside the curtain of the door entering on the next room, and
a girl's troubled face looked in, but he did not see.

Escape to some other world? And why not, after all? On the day his
memory came back he had resisted the idea in this very room. As the
fatalist he had resisted it then. Now how poor seemed the reasons for
not having ended it all that day! If his appointed time had been come,
the river would have ended him then--that had been his argument. Was
that argument not belief in Somebody or Something which governed his
going or staying? Was it not preordination? Was not fatalism, then,
the cheapest sort of belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something,
representing purpose and law and will? Attribute to anything power, and
there was God, whatever His qualities, personality, or being.

The little phial of laudanum was in his hand to loosen life into
knowledge. Was it not his duty to eliminate himself, rather than be an
unsolvable quantity in the problem of many lives? It was neither vulgar
nor cowardly to pass quietly from forces making for ruin, and so avert
ruin and secure happiness. To go while yet there was time, and smooth
for ever the way for others by an eternal silence--that seemed well.
Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say. But was it not worth while
being punished, even should the Cure's fond belief in the noble fable be
true, if one saved others here? Who--God or man--had the right to
take from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through
despair, but for others' sake? Had he not the right to make restitution
to Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, whom she had
learn