self coward if he would. Paul
knew better. He had long ago guessed that stronger forces were at work
in his friend than mere sorrow for the loss of a wife, however
dear--and he had guessed right. It was Desmond's sensitive conscience
that had been his arch tormentor throughout those months of silence
and strangeness that had brought him near to madness and Paul near to
despair.

Tragedy on tragedy--loss of the Boy, dread of blindness, the shock of
his own discovery of Evelyn's defection, and the awful fashion of her
death--had so unsteadied and overwrought his strong brain that, even
now, he could neither see nor think clearly in respect of those most
terrible weeks of his life. Obsessed by an exaggerated sense of his
own disloyalty to the wife who should never have been transplanted to
such stony soil, he saw himself virtually her murderer, in the eyes of
that God who was, for him, no vague abstraction but the most
commanding reality of his consciousness.

Day after day, week after week, he had lived over and over again the
events of that fateful month, from the moment of his return, to the
last bewildering, unforgettable scene with his wife. Always he
discovered fresh excuses for her. Always he lashed himself unsparingly
for his own failings;--the initial folly of bringing her to the
Frontier, his promise to Honor that had delayed his determination to
exchange, and more than all, that final straight speaking--wrung from
him by pain and shame--that had made fear of him outweigh even her
childish terror of the dark. In the hidden depth of his heart he had
been untrue to her, and his passionate attempt at reparation had come
too late. There had even been fevered moments when he told himself
that he, Theo Desmond, not the crazy fanatic in quest of
sainthood--should by rights have been hanged and burned on the day of
her death.

The whole tragical tangle, blurred and distorted by incessant
repetition, had come at last to seem almost a separate entity; a
horror, outside his own control, that now shrank to a pin-point and
now loomed gigantic, oppressive, till all true sense of proportion
was lost. The silence that he could not force himself to break,
infallibly made matters worse. And now came Honor, re-awakening the
great love he had wrestled with and trampled on to very small purpose;
a love beside which his chivalrous tenderness for Evelyn showed like
the flame of a candle in the blaze of noon.

Her sudden return, t