“Not now, Charlie, boy,” he said, shaking his head and trying to smile; “not now. I want to be alone.” And so I left him. Alone! _He wanted to be alone_. Were ever words more full of cruel mockery! It seems hard to understand sometimes, doesn’t it? And we get to questioning things we’d far better leave alone. I know at first I used to wonder why Almighty God ever let Breen make that slip. He could have stopped it, couldn’t He? But that’s riot right. We’re running on train orders from the Great Dispatcher, and the finite can’t span the infinite. Maybe you’ll think it queer that I left Breen like that, let him go to his room alone. You’re thinking that in his condition he might do himself harm--end it all, to put it bluntly. Well, that thought didn’t come to me then, it did afterward, but not then. Why? It must have been just the innate consciousness that he wouldn’t do that sort of thing. Some men face things one way, some face them another. It’s a question of individuality and temperament. I don’t think Breen could have done anything like that, I know he seemed so far apart from it in my mind that, as I say, the thought didn’t come to me. He was too big a man, big enough to have faced what was before him, faced conditions, faced the men, though God knows they treated him like skulking coyote, if it had not been for her. I want to stand right on this. Breen would never have done what he did if she had $cted differently. That much I know. But, I want to say it again, I’ve no right to judge her. Perhaps you’ve read that story of Kipling’s about the Black Tyrone Regiment that saw their dead? Well, Breen, as I told you, at the beginning, wasn’t popular, and the boys had seen their dead. Do you understand? Pariah, outcast, what you like, they made him, all except pity they gave him, and I say he would have taken it all, accepted it all, only there are some things too heavy for a man to bear, aren’t there? Load limit, the engineers call it when they build their bridge. Well, there’s a load limit on the heart and brain and soul of a man just as there is on a bridge; and while one, strained beyond the breaking point, goes crashing in a horrid mass of twisted wreckage to the bottom of the canon, to the bottom of the gorge, into the rushing, boiling waters of the river beneath, the other crashes, a damned soul, to the bottom of hell. Kitty Mooney had seen her dead. Kitty Mooney, the engineer’s sister! And Breen loved her, was going to marry her. That’s all.