He could see them living together for years--a devoted family--a pair of serpents under an iron bar, not daring to strike each other because the bar was mute and cold, and they could not tell what it would do if they struck. Some day Sparta, no doubt, would marry--her mother's man, this time. To the world they would present a united front. They would carry it off--oh, yes,--he trusted them for that. He shuddered a little, seeing them all at table together, a year, five years from now. A curly-haired young man, dressed in the extreme of frippery, with a face as bland and foolish as a face painted on an egg, sat at Sparta's left, making table-talk to his new relations. Poor rabbit, thought Andrew, and smiled. The last shreds of youth's dearest delusion, the delusion that life will come to a climax of thunder and cease, fell from him silently. Only by accident was life as neat a workman as that. The climax might come a dozen times, but after each climax the workman would go on, like an idiot building a castle, adding story upon story to what was already complete. His own life, by all canons of art and taste, should have finished when the last sand fell upon the mound on the beach they had left behind. Instead, here he was, eating pepper-stew, and relishing it, on the whole. If there were any moral inherent in the course of events which had happened to him, he had yet to descry it. But for accident he would be lying in the prison ditch with lead in his lungs, and Mr. Cave would be alive and roaring. Was he any better off as it was and Mr. Cave any worse?--he did not know. He felt that he was fast becoming a pagan and it hurt his sense of the fitness of things. Then the Scotch strain in him, that drop which with the Jewish drop and the Irish, can survive a dozen admixtures of blood to dominate a mind, reasserted itself and told him grimly that it was not his business to question the schemes of God, but to hold on dourly to a predestined path between damnation and damnation, and distrust the vain speculations of the Egyptians. He could not quite believe its voice--would it call Caterina a vain Egyptian, he wondered--but it sufficed to send him off to sleep as soundly as if he were hearing John Knox preach. 4.