"He can pursue his work in perfect sincerity. I found that out." "Can he if he does it with a low motive?" "My dear girl, whose motives are not mixed? Whose heart is single? "His was once!" "Before he met--you and me? I made the best job I could. I cemented the breakage; I couldn't undo it." "I would rather--" "He'd picturesquely drown himself?" "Oh, no," she said, with a shudder; "but it lowers my ideal of him." "That, considering your position, is not wholly a bad thing." "Do you think he's justified in doing it?" "To tell the truth, I don't see quite to the bottom of him. But he will do great things." "Now he is well quit of me?" Sir Roderick smiled. "Well, I don't like it." "Then you should have married him, and left Eugene to do the drowning." "Do you know, Sir Roderick, I rather doubt if Eugene would have drowned himself?" "I don't know; he has very good manners." They both laughed. "But all the same, I am unhappy about Mr. Stafford." "Ah, your notions of other people's morality are too exalted. I don't accept responsibility for Stafford. He would not have followed my suggestion unless the idea had been in germ in his own mind." Claudia's pre-occupation with Stafford's fate would have been somewhat disturbing to a lover less philosophical or less sympathetic than Eugene. As it was, he was pleased with her concern, and his sorrow for the trouble it occasioned her was mitigated by a conviction that its effect would not be permanent. In this idea he proved perfectly correct. As the weeks passed by and nothing was heard of the vanished man, his place in the lives of those who had been so intimately associated with him became filled with other interests, and from a living presence he dwindled to an occasional memory. It was as if he had really died. His name was now and then mentioned with the sad affection we accord to those who have gone before us; for the most part the thought of him was thrust out in the busy give-and-take of everyday life. Save for the absence of that bitter sense of hopelessness which the separation of death brings, Stafford might as well have passed on the road which, but for Ayre's intervention, he had marked out for himself. Claudia and Eugene were wrapped up in one another; their love tor him, though not dead, was dormant, and his name was oftener upon the lips of Ayre and Morewood than of those who had been most closely united with him in the bonds of common experience. But Ayre and Morewood, besides entertaining a kindly memory of his personal charm, found delight in studying him as a problem. They were keenly interested in the upshot of his new start in life, and their blunter perceptions were deaf to the dissonance between the ideal he had set before himself and the alternative Ayre had suggested for his adoption. Perhaps they were right. If none but saints may do the work of the world, much of its most useful work must go undone.