“You doubtless think that you, of all living men, are the most to be pitied, Captain. You are young; you have scarcely tasted of life; you have been permitted to look into the eyes of love with the good hope that in the days to come there would be happy fruition; you have an honorable name and forebears to whom your children might look back with honest pride; and in a few short hours all this will be blotted out for you forever. Tell me, sir; was it worth this stupendous sacrifice--the bare chance of taking a broken, disappointed fellow-man back to die this same death which is now confronting you?” I saw now that he was not meaning to rejoice in my downfall, and I took time for my answer. “A good soldier should not measure the weight of sacrifice in a question of duty.” His hands went apart in a sudden gesture of impatience. “What is duty? A man, by some blunderings of chance or perhaps by his own crafty chicanery, becomes your superior officer. Are you to lay aside all your convictions of justice and mercy and common manly honor merely because he holds up before you a fetish of soldierly obedience? Remember, he is but a man, as you are. Stripped of his rank and all the artificial contrivances which have made him for the moment figure as your superior, he becomes only a fellow human being, standing high or low in your estimation only as his heart is sound or depraved.” “Pardon me, Mr. Arnold,” I put in; “pardon me if I say that you are beclouding the issue. The matter of duty, as I have conceived it, does not rest upon the question of obedience to a ranking superior. It has a better foundation in the love of country. I will be very plain with you. It seemed to me to be for the best good of my poor distracted country that you should be made to go back and pay the penalty for the blow you have struck it. Acting upon that conviction, I came here--voluntarily, you must understand, and not upon the command of any superior whomsoever.” He took another step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did this from your own conception of your duty, and yet when the chance came you spared me. Captain Page. Why did you change your mind? Was it because you found me something less than the despicable piece of gallows-meat you had been told I was?” I could not tell if this were merely the undying vanity of the man fishing for compliments on the edge of the grave, or some better prompting; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I found you as I expected to find you, a most misguided man, as I still hold you to be; but yet a man, and neither greatly better nor worse than others, Mr. Arnold. The discovery that I made--or rather that was made for me--was in myself.” “Ah? And that was--?”