"They love me here," she said. "They trust me and they think me good--as they are. All think me that--the little children and this dear man here--and for a little while, since I have been here, I have lived like that. They made me believe that it was true--_true_. And there was shame and agony--and hope. It seemed they could not all be wrong, and I have asked and prayed that I might make it true always--and--and forgiveness for what I was." "You mean," he said again hoarsely, and he stepped toward her now, "you mean that you are--_straight_!" She did not answer--only now she turned her face toward him and lifted up her head. And for a long minute Madison gazed into the tear-splashed eyes, deep, brave in chastened wistfulness, gazed--and like a man stunned walked from the room, the cottage, and out across the lawn. --XX-- TO THE VICTOR ARE THE SPOILS Many were still about the lawn as he left the cottage--they were all about him, those sick, half frantic creatures--and still they made noises; still some of them cried and sobbed; still in their waning paroxysms they moved hither and thither. They appealed to some numbed, dormant sense in Madison, in a subconscious way, as things to be avoided. And so, almost mechanically, he took the little path that, striking off at right angles to the wagon track where it joined the Patriarch's lawn, came out again upon the main road at the further end of the village. And, as he walked, like tidal waves on-rushing, emotions, utterly at variance one with another, hurled themselves upon him, and he was swept from his mental balance, tossed here and there, rolled gasping, strangling in the chaos and turmoil of the waters, as it were, and, rising, was hurled back again. White as death itself was Madison's face; and at times his fingers with a twitching movement curled into clenched fists, at times his open palms sought his temples in a queer wriggling way and pressed upon them. Doubt, anger, fear, a rage unhallowed--in cycles--buffeted him until his brain reeled, and he was as a man distraught. It began at the beginning, that cycle, and dragged him along--and left him like one swooning, tottering, upon the edge of a precipice. And then it began over again. And it began always with a picture of the Roost that night--the vicious, unkempt, ragged figure of the Flopper--the sickly, thin, greedy face of Pale Face Harry, the drug fiend, winching a little as he plunged the needle into his flesh--the easy, unprincipled gaiety and eagerness of Helena for the new path of crime--crime--crime--the Roost exuded crime--filth--immorality--typified them, framed them well as they had sat there, the four of them, while that bruised-nosed bouncer had brought them drink on his rattling tin tray. And then his own self-satisfied, smug, complacent egotism at his own cleverness, his unbounded confidence in his own ability to pull off the game, and--