He was not responsible, he said to himself, for anything that had happened; and yet he loathed himself as a wretch unfit to live. And how Roma would loathe him when she should know that he had betrayed her into the power of his rival for some unexplained reason! And what would his mother think when she should be told that through his connivance and assistance Roma Fronde had been entrapped into marrying Hanson when she thought she was marrying Harcourt? And what would all his friends think when they should hear the degrading truth? If his mother could be spared the knowledge of his dishonor he thought he could bear the contumely of all the rest of the world. If, for her own sake, she could be spared this, which could only be a less sorrow and a less shame than his trial for robbery and murder and his death on the gallows could be. Oh, the poor, humiliated mother! Oh, the fair, forsaken bride! He had sinned to save them both from shame and sorrow, and now he awoke, as from a dream, to find that he had not saved them after all. For what was Roma’s condition now? And what would Dorothy Harcourt’s be soon. Oh, the maddening conflict of emotion! Oh, the despairing confusion of thought! Oh, the cruel fate that had brought him to this and compelled him to live! Why could he not be annihilated? Where was the mercy of Heaven? He looked down on the waters of the bay. They were very dark and still, and almost smooth enough to reflect the starlit sky. “There is peace,” he murmured to himself; “peace, rest and oblivion. Why should I not seek it, as a child seeks sleep? Oh, that I might sink to sleep, and sleep forever!” For a moment the insane temptation of the suicide overshadowed him. It would be so easy, so very easy, for him to drop quietly over the steamer’s side and find death and forgetfulness in the deep waters of the Chesapeake. No one would see him sink. No one would miss him until the next day. Even then no one would know but that he had got off the boat at some of the landings where she stopped to put off or take on passengers or freight. No one there would be sufficiently interested to inquire what had become of him. In fact, no one there even knew his name, or anything about him beyond the fact that he had been one of a wedding party on that trip. They were now on the broadest part of the bay. No one would ever find his body or know his fate. The opportunity was there, the temptation strong. Roma would not care anything about the mysterious fate of the missing wretch who had entrapped her into marriage with his rival and her own once rejected suitor. Only, perhaps, she would be better pleased to know that he had met his well deserved punishment.