continual justification.

"Catch me taking anything away from a girl like that to give it to a
damn Yankee like Steering," he would tell himself over and over. "Won't
she do the most good with it? It'll be hers soon. Won't she do the most
good? Answer me that, now."

So much for the outside where Madeira lived in the world of realities
and met the various demands of each day's relations capably and coolly.
Inside his private office behind the bank, at his desk, he lived in
another world, a world where shadow became substance, possibility became
actuality and fear made facts out of fancy.

At night, after Canaan had put its lights out and had lapsed into the
shroud-like stillness of a country town's sleep, Madeira was there, with
his ghost, in his office,--figuring, figuring. On the roll-top of his
desk he kept a letter spread out in front of him. It always happened
that he took that letter out of his vest pocket for the purpose of
destroying it, and it always happened that when he got up, far into the
night, he picked the letter up and replaced it in his pocket. If the
words of the letter had been seared across eternity with the red-hot
iron of fate they could not have been more indestructible.

Besides the letter, Madeira always had on the desk maps, geological
surveys, time estimates. Von Moltke never figured half so carefully nor
on half so many shaky hypotheses as did Madeira in his office during
these nights. He came to know, through awful, blood-sweating hours, that
with so much blasting, so much pick-and-shovel work, allowing for so
many back-sets from water and blind rock, so many shifts of men could
progress to certain points, in so many days. He sometimes realised that
all this was unnecessary; that it was aging him and crazing him; that he
could put his work through on the Tigmores long before word of old
Grierson's death would, by any unfortuitous accident, leak into Canaan,
if it ever got there; that he would never have to resort to the subways
that he was figuring on to steal the ore out of the Canaan Tigmores;
that all this ceaseless, merciless calculation was but the reaction of a
conscience, stalking, gaunt and lunatic, through the charnel-house of
its own experience. But for all that he had to go on crossing bridges
that he was never to reach, covering black tracks that he was never to
make. Often at his desk there, his mind became strangely obtunded and he
babbled vapidly; his big face pinched up t