"She!" it had sneered. "She for whom you risked and suffered so much! She whose fine courage you counted on--who you dreamed would rush to your defence, at any cost to herself! You need not have been afraid. She would have risked nothing. She cared for you--yes. But she cares a thousand times more for her place in the world's opinion. Why, she would have married Craig--_married_ him!--rather than face a reflected shame from a story affecting her father. So much reputation means to her! Here you are in your stripes, a convict, and _she knows it_! She knew all along! She doesn't guess you saw her in the court-room: she didn't mean you to, of course. How she must have suffered from fear that you would drag her into it! No doubt she is afraid you may repent and call on her now to help you. Perhaps that is why she has gone abroad. That is the real Echo Allen! That is the woman you have loved!" Should he call to her now, when she had left him to this suffering, giving him no little word of trust or gratitude? A painful fiery pride rose up in him. Not if his flesh was torn by red-hot pincers! Not in endless years, though every day were a separate hell, till he died! Never--never--never! Seared by pride, tortured by despair, with the black agony of doubt clinging to him like a coat-of-mail, memory dragged him backward through infernos of suffering, thrusting its searching fingers into each cranny of his mind, mocking him with shifting pictures cruelly incongruous, that like a _camera obscura_ turned and turned about a single focus--a grey old porch with Echo's figure leaning against a pillar and he looking up into her face. As though he had been a separate entity he saw himself moving through a thousand significant scenes of the flame-swept past--the long-gone, dead and buried yet living past--with her! And across these flitting outlines there stamped itself the forbidding legend that his ghostly guide showed Dante.... _Lasciate Ogni speranza_! By his own choice he had opened a bottomless chasm between the then and now, between the Harry Sevier he had been and the nameless convict branded by the righteous law, and this chasm was impassible and enduring. Ten years of oblivion, of loathsome existence under a number, of comradeship with felons, an interminable blank unlighted by one glimpse of joy! Years in which, at home, the mystery of his disappearance would pass from a nine-days'-wonder to a diminishing speculation, a vague curiosity, and at length to forgetfulness. His life, with its multiple ambitions, its hopes and strivings--its love--had been spilled like water into sand; there remained only the useless vessel, empty and dishonoured.