He had named this thing that separated them “class” in his thoughts. Now he began to see that it was something else. It was sin. It was right and wrong that had separated them all these years. They were not people who stopped at class. There were no social classes in their eyes, else they would not have companioned with him that glorious day so intimately. He had come to know, years back, that education had something to do with separations, and he had taken pains to study and read, and make himself acquainted with the best literature, and now he no longer felt that he would be separated from them in that way. But this thing that was back of it all was sin--had been sin all along. Perhaps if he had gone there, as that woman with the dear eyes had asked, he would have learned to know sin and not have been wise in his own conceit. Perhaps he might even have come to be in the same world with them. But the words were going on and they struck him sharply: “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law.” Yes, he was a transgressor of the law. He had broken the law of the land. That had never seemed a sin before. It had been only a matter of getting away with it. The sin would have been in being discovered, to his mind. Everybody else was doing it, some doing it bunglingly, and not getting away with it. He despised them. He had gone into it more for the game than the money. He had known he could do it without discovery. But he had not gotten away with it. He had been discovered. And by that girl! Not only that, but by the girl he most honored in all the earth! If he had been asked at the start whether he would like to have her know what he was doing he might not have thought much about it, but when her eyes looked into his with their question it was to him as if the great God had asked him: “What are you doing?” It was like the question that the Lord God called in the garden in the cool of the evening: “Adam, where art thou?” only Darcy did not even know that story, knew Adam only as a hazy being of history or mythology, he could not have told which. But he knew God’s voice when he heard it, even though it spoke through the voice of a woman--the woman he loved. Suddenly, he knew that too. He loved her. He had loved her all along. That was why he was going after her. She was lost and he was finding her. And somehow it was beginning to dawn upon his soul that he would not find her until he had found the God she loved, and set this thing right which was wrong with himself, if there was any such thing as setting it right in this crooked world. And then, if Darcy Sherwood had not been bound to find Joyce Radway and bring her safely home, he might have felt that life was not any longer worth living; for all the laws by which he had lived, and all the principles by which he had stood, were crumbling beneath him like the sands of the sea, and he felt himself stumbling in the darkness. CHAPTER XXII