"You don't mean--you _can't_ mean--" "There is nothing else to do, Charlie. Don't you see that in this way it will be all over at once? Think of the arrest, the long trial, the certain conviction, the parting, the stripes, the clipped hair! No, no, you must not oppose me. Ruth will forget me then, but, alive and in jail, I'd be a canker on her young soul. Lessie could marry again. God knows I'd want her to do so. Yes, it is the only way out, Charlie." The drunkard seemed a drunkard no longer. He might have been an impassioned young priest full of a holy desire to comfort as he stood before the wilted man and clasped his hands. He knelt at his brother's knees, he caught the tense fingers in his. "You shall not kill yourself!" he cried. "God will show you a way to avoid it. I feel it within me. There must be a way--there must!" "There is no other way!" William groaned. "I've thought of everything under heaven till I'm crazed with it all." He stood up. He put his limp arm about the shoulders of his brother. "Will it be known at once? Do the directors suspect?" Charles asked. "Not yet, but you know the bank examiner will be here Thursday. It can't be kept from him. If I were unmolested for three months I could replace the money. I'm sure more than that amount will come out of the Western mining lands I hold. The sale is made, and only a legal technicality holds back the final settlement." "Ah, then if you confessed the truth to the directors, and promised to replace the money, would they--" "They would send me to jail, just the same," William answered. "They are that sort, every man of them. In their eyes a man who will steal once will steal again, and they may be right--they may be right." "Nevertheless, you must not think of--the--the other thing, Billy. For God's sake, don't!" Charles pleaded. "What else can I do?" William swayed in his brother's embrace and turned toward the door. Charles released him, and stood speechless in sheer helplessness as his brother stalked to the door, opened it, and went slowly down the stairs. Left alone, the younger man turned to a window and stood staring blankly out into the sunshine. Presently he went to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out the flask of whisky. Taking a glass, he poured some of the fluid out and then stood staring at it in surprise. A strange thing had happened. It was like a miracle, and yet psychologists have said that it belongs to the regular order of nature. Charles was conscious of no desire for the drink before him; in fact, he was averse to it. He was under the sway of a high spiritual emotion, which the thing in his hand seemed vaguely to oppose. He marveled over the change in himself as he held the glass up to the light.