"It is true," he said, hoarse misery in his tone. "I have wronged you. If I could coin my blood drop by drop, to pay for the past, I could not set that right. If giving my life over and over again would save you pain, I would give it gladly. But what you ask now is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward. I did not kill Moreau. That is all I can say to you or to those who try me." "Your life!" she said with dry lips. "It will mean that. That counts so fearfully much to me--more than my own life a hundred times. Yet there is something that counts more than all that to you!" His face was that of a man who holds his hand in the fire. "Jessica," he said, "it is like this with me. When you found me here--the day I saw you on the balcony--I was a man whose soul had lost its compass and its bearings. My conscience was asleep. You woke it, and it is fiercely alive now. And now with my memory has come back a debt of my past that I never paid. Whatever the outcome, for my soul's sake I must settle it now and wipe it from the score for ever. Nothing counts--nothing can count--more than you! But I must sail by the needle; I must be truthful to the best that is in me." She rose slowly to her feet with a despairing gesture. "'_He saved others_,'" she quoted in a hard voice, "'_himself he could not save!_' I once heard a minister preach from that text at home; it was your friend, the Reverend Henry Sanderson. I thought it a very spiritual sermon then--that was before I knew what his companionship had been to you!" In the exclamation was the old bitterness that had had its spring in that far-away evening at the white house in the aspens, when Harry Sanderson had lifted the curtain from his college career. In spite of David Stires' predilection, since that day she had distrusted and disliked, at moments actively hated him. His mannerisms had seemed a pose and his pretensions hypocrisy. On her wedding-day, when she lashed him with the blame of Hugh's ruin, this had become an ingrained prejudice, impregnable because rooted deeper than reason, in the heritage of her sex, the eternal proclivity, which saw Harry Sanderson, his motley covered with the sober domino of the Church, standing self-righteously in surplice and stole, while Hugh slid downward to disgrace. "If there were any justice in the universe," she added, "it should be he immolating himself now, not you!" His face was not toward her and she could not see it go deadly white. The sudden shift she had given the conversation had startled him. He turned to the tiny barred window that looked out across the court-yard square--where such a little time since he had found his lost self. "I think," he said, "that in my place, he would do the same."