ce, a wonderful thing.

"Oh, I'm awake now! But I reckon maybe that doesn't mean that I'm
getting out of my dream, but only into it, deeper yet. I was mad
for you then. I could feel the blood sting in my veins, for you.
Life is life after all, and we're made as we are. But later, now,
beside that, on top of that, something else--do you think it's--do
you suppose I'm capable of it, selfish as I am? Do you reckon it's
love, just big, worthy, _decent_ love, better than anything in the
world? Is that--do you reckon, dear girl, that that's why I'm able
now to say good-by? I loved you once so much I could not let you
go. Now I love so much I can not let you stay! I reckon this is
love. I'm not ashamed to tell it. I'm not afraid to justify it.
And I can't help it."

It was any sort of time, a moment, an hour, before there was spoken
speech between them after that. At last they both heard her voice.

"Now, you begin to pay. I am glad. I am glad."

"Then it is your revenge? Very well. You have it."

"No, no! You must not say that. Believe me, I want you to feel
how--how much I admire--no, wait,--how much I admire any man who
could show your courage. It's not revenge, it's not vanity--"

He waited, his soul in his eyes, hoping for more than this; but she
fell silent again.

"Then it is the end," he said.

He held up his fingers, scarred to the bone.

"That's where I bruised my hands when I clenched on the table,
yonder. You wouldn't think it, maybe, but I love pictures. I've
spent a lot of time looking for them and at them. I remember one
collection--many pictures of the martyrs, horrors in art,
nightmares. Here was a man disemboweled--they wound his very
bowels about a windlass, before his eyes, and at each turn--I could
see it written in the picture--they asked him, did he yield at
last, did he agree, did he consent. . . . Then they wound again.
Here another man was on an iron chair, flames under him. Now and
then they asked him. Should they put out the flames and hear him
say he had foresworn his cause? Again, there was a man whom they
had shot full of arrows, one by one, little by little, and they
asked him, now and then, if he foreswore his faith. . . . But I
knew he would not--I knew these had not. . . .

"That's the way it is," he said slowly. "That's what you're seeing
now. These scars on my fingers came cheap. I reckon they've got
to run deeper, clean down into my heart. Yet yo