lved the theory of personal responsibility.

With narrowing eyes, from which slowly doubt faded, he gazed at duty
with all the calm courage of his race, not at first recognising it as
duty in its new and dreadful guise.

But night after night, patiently perplexed, he retraced his errant
pathway through life, back to the source of doubt and pain; and, once
arrived there, he remained, gazing with impartial eyes upon the ruin two
young souls had wrought of their twin lives; and always, always somehow,
confronting him among the debris, rose the spectre of their deathless
responsibility to one another; and the inexorable life-sentence sounded
ceaselessly in his ears: "For better or for worse--for better or for
worse--till death do us part--till death--till death!"

Dreadful his duty--for man already had dared to sunder them, and he had
acquiesced to save her in the eyes of the world! Dreadful,
indeed--because he knew that he had never loved her, never could love
her! Dreadful--doubly dreadful--for he now knew what love might be; and
it was not what he had believed it when he executed the contract which
must bind him while life endured.

Once, and not long since, he thought that, freed from the sad disgrace
of the shadowy past, he had begun life anew. They told him--and he told
himself--that a man had that right; that a man was no man who stood
stunned and hopeless, confronting the future in fetters of conscience.
And by that token he had accepted the argument as truth--because he
desired to believe it--and he had risen erect and shaken himself free of
the past--as he supposed; as though the past, which becomes part of us,
can be shaken from tired shoulders with the first shudder of revolt!

No; he understood now that the past was part of him--as his limbs and
head and body and mind were part of him. It had to be reckoned
with--what he had done to himself, to the young girl united to him in
bonds indissoluble except in death.

That she had strayed--under man-made laws held guiltless--could not
shatter the tie. That he, blinded by hope, had hoped to remake a life
already made, and had dared to masquerade before his own soul as a man
free to come, to go, and free to love, could not alter what had been
done. Back, far back of it all lay the deathless pact--for better or for
worse. And nothing man might wish or say or do could change it. Always,
always he must remain bound by that, no matter what others did or
thought; alwa