"I couldn't go on my knees to anything," the younger took up his burden. "Wrong or not it is the way I'm made. I'd not hang about where I wasn't wanted. Although you mightn't think it. And I am sorry I came here. I do things like that all the time; I mean I do, say, exactly the opposite of what I plan. You'll think I am a braying ass, of course." "Stop for a breath," Howat Penny recommended; "a breath, and a cigarette." He extended his case; and, in place of taking a cigarette, Polder examined the case resentfully. "There is it," he declared; "correct, like all the rest of you. And it's only old leather. But mine would be different. I could sink and Mariana wouldn't put out a hand just on account of that. It's wrong," he insisted. Expressed in that manner it did seem to Howat Penny a small reason for the withholding of any paramount salvation. Yet, he told himself, he had no intention, desire, to undertake the weight of any reformation. A futile effort, he added, with his vague consciousness of implacable destiny, his dim sense of man moved from without, in locked progression. Polder was young, rebellious; but he could grow older; he would grow older and comprehend; or else beat himself to death on obdurate circumstance. What concerned Howat was the hope that Mariana would be no further involved in either process. She too had this to learn--that, in the end, blood was stronger than will; the dead were terribly potent. He had, even, no inclination to say any of this to the man frowning in the dusk at his side. It would be useless, a mere preaching. An expression, too, of a slight but actual sympathy for James Polder would be misleading. In the main Howat was entirely careless of what might happen to the other; it was only where, unfortunately, he touched Mariana that he entered into the elder's world. He would sacrifice him for Mariana in an instant. Polder rose. "I must leave," he announced. Howat Penny expressed no regret, and the other hesitated awkwardly. "It's no use!" he finally exclaimed. "I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces. James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more articulate than the thin whirring of the locusts. He went quickly into the house, to the warm glow of his lamp, the memories of his pictures, the figurine in baked clay with Hermes' wand of victory. XXVIII