"No, no," John agreed, flushing. "Of course not that. I suppose there is an honor even in crime, a class distinction. Sir Henry Morgan probably despised a common thief, and Paul Clifford would not pick his neighbor's pocket at dinner. No; we will pay our inherited debts, if we have to steal for it. What a _comédie-héroïque_!" Robert regarded him seriously. "You are just playing?" he doubted. "I am not playing at all; only looking at things. For the time left us is not long. If we do nothing, this place will go, and with it all that Theodora and Aunt Rose call life. We must then take these women, Aunt Rose an invalid, Theo a spoiled and petted patrician, to some cheap city lodging, and there strive to support them. How, I haven't any idea. Some one might employ us as clerks, possibly. I have traveled all over Europe and speak French and Italian; that is all my stock in trade, except an education." "Mine is less." "We have wasted our time thoroughly, if innocently. Now we pay. Do you wonder that I look at the outlaw's path that offers itself?" His brother moved, startled. "Offers itself, John?" "Yes; I did not think of this without the prompting of circumstance. Are you dismayed, or shocked?" "I can not see very clearly," Robert answered simply. "Or, rather, I keep seeing the wrong things. Nothing dismays me to-night except the idea of pain coming to Theo and her mother. I do not say it should be so; merely that it is. We are more ornamental than useful, we Allards, as you point out, but we have the art of loving. I think most people have a less capacity for it; I believe it is a certain intensity born with one--a gift, a talent. And we have it. Tell me more." "I shall not tell you very much, because the work is only for one of us," John said. "One of us must go, the other stay here and live as always. One must still be master of Sun-Kist, still the head of this household of ours and an irreproachable citizen. He had better not know too accurately what the one who goes is doing." "John!" John Allard slipped impulsively from the veranda rail and came to sit on the arm of Robert's chair, drawing him into a caressing embrace. "I know; we've always played together, dear old fellow. School and college, and the short time since,--the two years' difference between us got lost pretty early. But we must learn to go alone at last. And if we undertake this insanity--for it is little better--we must stand without flinching all it brings. Is it worth while? I do not know, but I know many a man has gone into the underworld to protect a woman. How many cashiers have misused funds entrusted to them, how many business men have stooped to illegal methods, in order to give their wives--not necessities, but luxuries? We see it every day, this cowardice for some one loved. Only they do it by degrees, and we do it all at once." Robert laid his hand over the one on his shoulder.