What a solution it would have been, Rendel felt, if he had indeed been able to make up his mind to the step that Wentworth evidently thought he might be contemplating--what an answer to everything! and as again that burning recollection came over him he felt that, in spite of the courage required for suicide, it would have required less courage to put himself out of the world, beyond the possibility of its ever happening again, than to remain in it and face what other agony of humiliation Fate might have in store for him. But he was not alone, unfortunately; his own destiny was not the only one in question. And if his words, his intention, his faith in the future had meant anything at all when he told Rachel that there was no sacrifice he would not be ready to make for her, he was bound to go on doggedly and meet the worst. He walked aimlessly through the wood, higher and higher, until he reached a sort of clearing from which he could see, far below him, the white road winding back again to Schleppenheim, and presently as he looked he saw driving rapidly back in the direction of the town the open carriages containing the people he had just left. Stamfordham must be in one of them. What were they saying about him, those people? Or, if not saying, what were they thinking? Could he ever look one of them in the face again? Not one. And again he had a wild moment of thinking that it would be possible to put the thing right, to establish his innocence, to insist upon knowing how it was that Sir William Gore had given the information to the _Arbiter_, on knowing what the arrangement was with Pateley on which that _coup de theatre_ had depended, and he sprang to his feet with the determination that he would go straight back into Schleppenheim, seek out Pateley and insist upon knowing what had happened. Then, just as before, the revulsion came. The principal thing, he had no need to ask Pateley. He knew, and that was the thing other people might not know. In a little while, he was told, Rachel would be herself again, and perhaps able to remember: she must not come back to the knowledge of something that must be such a cruel blow to her faith in her father, her adoring love for him. And yet as he turned downwards and strode hurriedly back along the woodland paths, across the shafts of sunlight which were growing longer as the day wore on, he felt how absurdly, horribly unequal the two things were that were at stake. On the one hand his own future, his success, his whole life, all the possibilities he had dreamt of; on the other, reprobation falling on one who was beyond the reach of it, one who had no longer any possibilities, who had nothing to lose, whose hopes and fears of worldly success, whose agitations had been for ever stilled by the hand of death. And Rachel? Would the suffering of knowing that her father's memory was attacked, of being rudely awakened from her illusions to find that in the eyes of the