“Now I am ready. In carrying out the one compelling and absorbing purpose of my life I have been made the most wretched and most misunderstood of men. I have sternly brushed aside love, hope, joy—everything which means life to a passionate and intense nature like my own. But this is an old story. I had come to think that the dwarfing and cramping restraints of my self-imposed life-work were second nature—more, that the life I was leading was the only life possible to me. I would have died fighting for the triumph of my idea—they would have found my body in the last trench after the battle was done, and nobody had been the wiser, no one would ever have known what a falsely-true life had been mine, had not this last horrible sacrifice been required by the insatiable purpose which has sucked away my life. “I had asked for nothing from fate, but the right to live and die with my secret unbetrayed. I had begged of God nothing more than that I be suffered to seal with my death the loyalty to poor Janet that I had striven to make of my whole life. But no. Even this beggarly scrap of comfort has been denied to me—and by the most unspeakable irony of fate, I find myself confronted with the damnable necessity of throwing away all these dumb years of denial and self-effacement in order to do Janet and the children the only service which still remains possible for me to do. Is it not horrible, Sir Nelson? I had thought to make my life of some little good by offering it to protect a woman and her children—and now, lest they be buried by my own ruin, I must undo everything that I have done during all these years.” He paused and looked at his old friend, who showed a growing concern that indicated he began really to believe Fair had lost his reason. “Sir Nelson, I see that you do not comprehend me—perhaps I am beginning at the wrong end. Yes, I am, of course. Let me give you some concrete facts before asking you to follow me. Well, then, I tell you that I, your old friend’s son, the man whom you have helped and watched over, as if I were your son—I, Sir Nelson, have committed a crime against society, against nature, against life!” “Crime?” exclaimed the old Baronet, springing to his feet and grasping Fair’s hand, thoroughly convinced that he was acting under some mental and nervous excitement that had proved too much for his reason. “Crime? Good God, boy, you are mad! I can’t believe this—I do not believe it!”