"God knows I'd like to," he said, choking a little; "that's what I counted on. God knows I'd like to go out there and lead a decent life--but I don't go that way--I don't crawl out and leave you--what's coming to you is coming to me." "That won't help us any, Harry," said Madison softly, and his hand tightened in an eloquent pressure on Pale Face Harry's shoulder. "You go--and God bless you!" Again Pale Face Harry shook his head. "No," he said. "I stick. If the game's got you, it's got me too--to the limit. There's no use talking about that." The Flopper licked his lips miserably. "Swipe me!" he mumbled. "Hell wasn't never like dis! Me an' Mamie we've got it fixed, an' her old man says he'll take me inter de store. Say, Doc, say--ain't dere a chanst ter live straight now we wants ter?" But Madison did not hear the Flopper save in a vague, inconsequential way--he was looking at Helena. She had drooped forward a little over the table, her chin in her hands, her lips quivering--and a white misery in her face seemed to bring a chill, a numbness to his heart. His Hands clenched, and he began to pace up and down the room. How buoyantly he had tackled the problem--buoyant in his own emancipation, buoyant in his love, in the future full of dreams, full of inspiration, full of the new life that Helena and he would live together! How confidently he had settled himself to undo in a moment the work of months, to outline a mere matter of detail, with never a thought that he was face to face with a problem that he could never solve--that brought him to the realization that the game, not he, was the master still, iron-handed, implacable--that though the mental chains were loosed it was but as if, in ironic justice, in grim punishment, only that he might look, clear-visioned, upon the ignominy of the physical shackles he himself had forged and fashioned so readily, whose breaking now was beyond his strength. He had done his work well! In the first few moments, an hour ago, when he had begun to consider the problem, as seeming difficulties arose, he had turned coolly from one alternative to another. And then slowly a sickening sense of the truth had begun to dawn upon him--and like a man lost in a great forest, peril around him, he had plunged then desperately in this direction and in that, as a glimmering point of light here or there had seemed to promise an avenue of escape--only to find it vanish at almost the first step, the way closed as by some invisible, remorseless power. No, not invisible--it seemed to take the form of the Patriarch--for at every turn the majestic figure stood and would not let him pass.