ad the temptation and not the conscience. What does either of
you know of me who had both?

"And what do I know about either of you," he went on, taking up
again the lonely vigil of his walk and questioning; "you who
preached against the Scarlet Woman, how do I know you were not the
scarlet man? I may have derived both from you--both conscience and
sin--without hypocrisy. All those years during which your face was
hardening, your one sincere prayer to God may have been that He
would send you to your appointed place before you were found out by
men on earth. And you with your fresh red face, you may have lain
down beside the wife of your youth, and have lived with her all
your years, as chaste as she."

He resumed his walk, back and forth, back and forth; and his
thoughts changed:

"What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them
forward in my life as being responsible for my nature? If I roll
back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers? and had not
their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those
who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all,
and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?"

How silent the night was, how silent the great house! Only his
slow footsteps sounded there like the beating of a heavy heart
resolved not to fail.

At last they died away from the front of the house, passing inward
down a long hallway and growing more muffled; then the sound of
them ceased altogether: he stood noiselessly before his mother's
door.

He stood there, listening if he might hear in the intense stillness
a sleeper's breathing. "Disappointed mother," he said as silently
as a spirit might speak to a spirit.

Then he came back and slowly began to mount the staircase.

"Is it then wrong for a man to do right? Is it ever right to do
wrong?" he said finally. "Should I have had my fling and never
have cared and never have spoken? Is there a true place for
deception in the world? May our hypocrisy with each other be a
virtue? If you have done evil, shall you live the whited
sepulchre? Ah, Isabel, how easily I could have deceived you! Does
a woman care what a man may have done, if he be not found out? Is
not her highest ideal for him a profitable reputation, not a
spotless character? No, I will not wrong you by these thoughts.
It was you who said to me that you once loved all that you saw in
me, and believed that you saw everything. All t