ch had been full of a natural human anguish,
grew suddenly hard.

"You are not particularly grateful to your rescuers," he said. "Yet if
they had been a few minutes later, you too would have been beyond their
help."

Anstice was quick to notice the renewed hostility in the young man's
tone.

"Just so." His manner, too, had changed. "But can you expect me to feel
a very vivid gratitude to the men who restored my life to me, seeing
with what memories that life must always be haunted?"

"Need you endure the haunting of those memories?"

The question, spoken quietly, yet with an obvious significance, took
Anstice aback. For a moment he frowned, his dazed mind fumbling after
the speaker's meaning.

"_Need_ I?" Suddenly he knew what Cheniston had meant to imply. "Ah--you
mean a man may always determine the length of his days?"

Cheniston nodded, never taking his eyes off the other's face.

"I see. Well, suicide would be a way out, of course. But"--for a second
his eyes hardened, grew stern--"I don't mean to take that way--unless
life grows too much for me. A second--mistake"--he spoke slowly--"would
not annul the first."

"No." Cheniston's face had lost all its boyishness; it looked haggard,
unhappy, old. "Possibly not. But when one has made a mistake of so
tragic a nature I should have thought one would have been only too ready
to pay the price of one's miscalculation."

For a second Anstice stared at him silently.

"Just so," he said at last, very quietly, taking his hands out of his
pockets for the first time. "The question is, What is the price? And do
you really think that to repudiate a debt by running away from one's
creditor, so to speak, is as satisfactory a settlement as to pay it coin
by coin, each coin drawn from one's own heart's blood?"

This time it was Cheniston who stared at him in non-comprehension.
Presently he said slowly:

"I think I understand. You mean the strongest man is the one who can
stand up to any situation with which life confronts him; can pay a debt
to the uttermost farthing though it may make him bankrupt in the doing.
That is what you mean?"

"Yes," said Anstice steadily. "That is what I mean. God only knows what
the price may be, and whether I shall have the coin in my treasury when
I'm called on to pay ... if I am so called upon. And by the way"--his
face hardened--"do I understand you to mean that I'm your debtor--that
it is to you that the price may--one day--be paid?"