"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she neither forgot nor forgave. "She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth." Stainton slowly refilled his glass. Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was accustomed to be interested. "You certainly cured yourself out West," he said. "Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do. First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'" "Well," said Holt, "you've done it." "You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton. "Not me. I don't go in for spooks." "They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves, walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost." "Oh!" said Holt, "do they?" "That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death. I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did. I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you admired me for." "Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd become a brave man." "No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever was." "I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did even better with the other scarecrow."