little bit _exaltee_; but how do you think you'll feel when they've--when
they've"--he continued to speak with his eyes shut convulsively--"when
they've arrested me and tried me and sentenced me and locked me up for
ten or fifteen years?"

"I shall feel as if the bitterness of death were past. But I should feel
worse than that--I should feel as if the bitterness of both death and
hell were still to come if we didn't make an effort to shoulder our own
responsibilities."

There was more in the same vein. He listened for the greater part of the
time with his eyes closed. He was too unutterably tired to argue or to
contest her point of view. Beyond suggesting that there were sides to
the question she hadn't yet considered, he felt helpless. He was
restrained, too, from setting them forth by a certain hesitation in
demanding from her anything she did not concede of her own accord. That
she would ultimately see for herself he had little doubt. In any case he
was more or less indifferent from sheer spiritual exhaustion. He had
ceased to direct, or try to direct, his own affairs or those of any one
else. In his present condition he could only lie still and let come what
might. Fate or God would arrange things either in the way of adjustment
or of fatal ruin without interference on his part.

So as he lay and listened to his daughter he uttered some bit of reason
or some feeble protest only now and then. When, occasionally, he looked
at her, it was to see her--somewhat deliriously--white, slim, ethereal,
inexorable, like the law of right. He was feverish; his head throbbed;
whenever he opened his eyes the objects in the room seemed to whirl
about, while she sat tense, low-voiced, gentle, a spirit of expiation.

Among the various ways in which he had thought she might take his dread
announcement this one had never occurred to him; and yet, now that he
saw it, he recognized it as just what he might have expected from the
almost too rigid rectitude and decidedly too uncompromising pride that
made up her character. It was the way, too, he admitted, most worthy of
a Guion. It was the way he would have chosen for himself if he had
nothing to consider but his own tastes. He himself was as eager in his
way to make satisfaction as she; he was only deterred by considerations
of common sense. From the point of view of a man of business it was more
than a little mad to refuse the money that would pay his creditors, hush
up a scandal, a