And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the face. The man was in no sense a coward--_flinch_ was not in him. He came out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat Marguerite--the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion in his heart leaped up--a groan came in place of the words he had promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet. He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through clenched teeth. 'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not dead; the engagement is not broken.' There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any right to use--harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur. There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell, and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom again. She looked into it with just the same attitude--even to the tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing--as five minutes before she had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white face--whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight--saw a look of utter, hopeless quiet settle there--such quiet as one sees in an unclosed coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving, as covers deadly wounds--settle never again to rise till Death shall sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime. Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give--the promise of lifelong love and tenderness--was itself a deadly wrong--would blast his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest realization of helplessness went over his heart.