s revenge for the
letters she wrote him when she first got word of his tricks, and then,
too, he's coming back to carouse on her money and the money she's made
on his father's land, that he niver looked to himself."

O'Shea stalked through the small dark rooms and went out, closing the
outer door gently behind him. Caius sat still, wrapped in his blankets.
He bowed his head upon his knees. The darkness was only the physical
part of the blackness that closed over his spirit. There was only one
light in this blackness--that was Josephine's face. Calm he saw it,
touched with the look of devotion or mercy; laughing and dimpled he saw
it, a thing at one with the sunshine and all the joy of earth; and then
he saw it change, and grow pale with fear, and repulsion, and disgust.
Around this one face, that carried light with it, there were horrid
shapes and sounds in the blackness of his mind. He had been a good man;
he had preferred good to evil: had it all been a farce? Was the thing
that he was being driven to do now a thing of satanic prompting, and he
himself corrupt--all the goodness which he had thought to be himself
only an organism, fair outside, that rotted inwardly? Or was this fear
the result of false teaching, the prompting of an artificial conscience,
and was the thing he wished to do the wholesome and natural course to
take--right in the sight of such Deity as might be beyond the curtain of
the unknown, the Force who had set the natural laws of being in motion?
Caius did not know. While his judgment was in suspense he was beset by
horrible fears--the fear that he might be driven to do a villainous
deed, the greater fear that he should not accomplish it, the awful fear,
rising above all else in his mind, of seeing Josephine overtaken by the
horrible fate which menaced her, and he himself still alive to feel her
misery and his own.

No, rather than that he would himself kill the man. It was not the part
that had been assigned to him, but if she would not save herself it
would be the noblest thing to do. Was he to allow O'Shea, with a wife
and children, to involve himself in such dire trouble, when he, who had
no one dependent upon him, could do the deed, and take what consequences
might be? He felt a glow of moral worth like that which he had felt when
he decided upon his mission to the island--greater, for in that his
motives had been mixed and sordid, and in this his only object was to
save lives that were of more