doing the right deed as if by helpless instinct, and seeing himself in
every case, at every turn, tricked by circumstance out of every vestige
of merit. So it seemed to him. The long contemplated restitution was
accomplished. On the morning when Aurora and Clotilde had expected to be
turned shelterless into the open air, they had called upon him in his
private office and presented the account of which he had put them in
possession the evening before. He had honored it on the spot. To the two
ladies who felt their own hearts stirred almost to tears of gratitude,
he was--as he sat before them calm, unmoved, handling keen-edged facts
with the easy rapidity of one accustomed to use them, smiling
courteously and collectedly, parrying their expressions of
appreciation--to them, we say, at least to one of them, he was "the
prince of gentlemen." But, at the same time, there was within him,
unseen, a surge of emotions, leaping, lashing, whirling, yet ever
hurrying onward along the hidden, rugged bed of his honest intention.

The other restitution, which even twenty-four hours earlier might have
seemed a pure self-sacrifice, became a self-rescue. The f.m.c. was the
elder brother. A remark of Honore made the night they watched in the
corridor by Doctor Keene's door, about the younger's "right to exist,"
was but the echo of a conversation they had once had together in
Europe. There they had practised a familiarity of intercourse which
Louisiana would not have endured, and once, when speaking upon the
subject of their common fatherhood, the f.m.c., prone to melancholy
speech, had said:

"You are the lawful son of Numa Grandissime; I had no right to be born."

But Honore quickly answered:

"By the laws of men, it may be; but by the law of God's justice, you are
the lawful son, and it is I who should not have been born."

But, returned to Louisiana, accepting with the amiable, old-fashioned
philosophy of conservatism the sins of the community, he had forgotten
the unchampioned rights of his passive half-brother. Contact with
Frowenfeld had robbed him of his pleasant mental drowsiness, and the
oft-encountered apparition of the dark sharer of his name had become a
slow-stepping, silent embodiment of reproach. The turn of events had
brought him face to face with the problem of restitution, and he had
solved it. But where had he come out? He had come out the beneficiary of
this restitution, extricated from bankruptcy by an agreement