So he came back to it. He wondered if he were awake. Was it possible that ten or fifteen minutes could have transformed him from a hard-working, home-loving boy into a fugitive who had no choice left but to shoot himself? As for facing the disgrace, he did not consider it. To stand before his mother charged with theft, even if it was on her behalf, was not to be thought of. He couldn’t do it, and there was an end to it. Still less could he go through the other incidentals, handcuffs, a cell, the court, the sentence, Bitterwell, and the lifetime that would come after his release. He could put the pistol to his heart and, if necessary, he could burn in hell—if there was a hell; but he couldn’t do the other thing. And yet to put the pistol to his heart and burn in hell formed a lamentable choice on their side. "I’m not a thief," he protested, inwardly. "I took the money—how could I help it, with dad sick and ma at the end of everything?—but _I’m not a thief_." He was sure of that. It became a formula, not perhaps of comfort, but of justification. Had he been a thief, he told himself, he could have faced the music; but it was precisely because he had taken money while preserving his inner probity that he refused to be judged by the standards of men. Once more he couldn’t express it in this way to himself; but it was the conclusion to which his instincts leaped. Only one tribunal could discern between the good and evil in his case; so he was resolved to go before it. In a quiet corner he began to cry. He was only a boy, with a boy’s facility of emotion, especially of distress. He cried at the thought of his mother and the girls, with no one to fend for them, and no Teddy coming home in the evenings. It was true that, apart from his filchings, he had been able to fend for them only to the extent of eighteen per, but there was always a chance of better days ahead. Even at the worst of times, they had a good deal of fun among themselves, and now.... Now his mother would be in the kitchen, beginning to get supper, and each of the girls would be making her way back to Indiana Avenue. Pansy’s dog clock would tell her when to watch for them, and the loving little creature would be eying the door, ready to welcome each of them in turn. If she had a preference, it was for himself, and the feeling of her gentle paws against his shin was connected with the tenderest things he knew.