worth than his own. Should he kill the man,
he would hardly escape death, and even if he did, he could never look
Josephine in the face again.

Why not? Why, if this deed were so good, could he not, after the doing
of it, go back to her and read gratitude in her eyes? Because
Josephine's standard of right and wrong was different from his. What was
her standard? His mind cried out an impatient answer. "She believes it
is better to suffer than to be happy." He did not believe that; he would
settle this matter by his own light, and, by freeing her and saving her
faithful friends, be cut off from her for ever.

It would be an easy thing to do, to go up to the man and put a knife in
his heart, or shoot him like a dog!

His whole being revolted from the thought; when the deed came before his
eyes, it seemed to him that only in some dark feverish imagination could
he have dreamed of acting it out, that of course in plain common-sense,
that daylight of the mind, he could not will to do this.

Then he thought again of the misery of the suffering wife, and he
believed that, foreign as it was to his whole habit of life, he could do
this, even this, to save her.

Then again came over him the sickening dread that the old rules of right
and wrong that he had been taught were the right guides after all, and
that Josephine was right, and that he must submit.

The very thought of submission made his soul rise up in a mad tempest of
anger against such a moral law, against all who taught it, against the
God who was supposed to ordain it; and so strong was the tempest of this
wrath, and so weak was he, perplexed, wretched, that he would have been
glad even at the same moment to have appealed to the God of his fathers,
with whom he was quarrelling, for counsel and help. His quarrel was too
fierce for that. His quarrel with God made trust, made mere belief even,
impossible, and he was aware that it was not new, that this was only the
culminating hour of a long rebellion.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WILD WAVES WHIST.

Next morning, when Caius walked forth into the glory of the April
sunshine, he felt himself to be a poor, wretched man. There was not a
fisherman upon the island, lazy, selfish as they were, and despised in
his eyes, that did not appear to him to be a better man than he. All the
force of training and habit made the thing that he was going to do
appear despicable; but all the force of training and habit was not
strong