now."

He spoke heavily; all the youth seemed to have gone out of him. After a
moment, as Crowther waited he turned with a gesture of hopelessness and
faced him. "I'm like a dog on a chain," he said. "I drag this way and
that, and eat my heart out for freedom. But it's all no use. I've got to
live and die on it." He clenched his hands in sudden passionate
rebellion. "But I'm damned if I'm going to tell anybody! It's hell enough
without that!"

Crowther's hand closed slowly and very steadily on his shoulder. "It's
just hell that I want to save you from, sonny," he said. "It may seem the
hardest part to you now, but if you shirk it you'll go further in still.
I know very well what I'm saying. And it's just because you're man enough
to feel this thing and not a brute beast to forget it, that it's hurt you
so infernally all these years. But it'll hurt you worse, lad, it'll wring
your very soul, if you keep it a secret between you and the woman you
love. It's a big temptation, but--if I know you--you're going to stand up
to it. She'll think the better of you for it in the end. But it'll be a
shadow over both your lives if you don't. And there are some things that
even a woman might find it hard to forgive."

He stopped. Piers' eyes were hard and fixed. He scarcely looked as if he
heard. From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea. Close
at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved
in their sleep. But Piers made neither sound nor movement. He stood like
an image of stone.

Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a
desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to
be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with
unswerving patience for the result.

Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his
voice,--humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I?
Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me,
Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back."

"You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision. "It's the only way
out. Take it like a man, and you'll win through! Shirk it and--well,
sonny, no shirker ever yet got anything worth having out of life. You
know that as well as I do."

Piers straightened himself with a brief laugh. "Yes, I know that much.
But--I sometimes ask myself if I'm any better than a shirker. Life is
such a beast