What a mess he had made of his life! What folly had been each one of those flaming decisions that had marked his career! Was he a coward? The word stung. There was a difference between flying from temptation and resisting it. He remembered the comparison he had just made between himself and Christian flying from the Burning City, and suddenly saw the meanness and selfishness of Bunyan’s Hero—egotism as colossal as that of St. Simeon Stylites on whom he had once airily lectured to Quong Ho. What mattered anything human, wife, children born and the child within the womb, so long as he saved his own wretchedly unimportant soul? For aught Christian cared, all his family and his friends could go literally to Hell, so long as he himself escaped. A sorry figure. And just such a sorry figure had cut John Baltazar. And, life being real and implacable, he had not even succeeded in saving his paltry soul. He had lost it at every step. His fine phrases to Quong Ho; his boast of altruistic service to mankind? Sheer juggling with sacred things. Sheer egotism. Sheer vanity. What a mess he had made of his life! What folly had been his cowardly flight! If he had known, he would have remained. Yes. A salve to conscience. But the consciences of brave men need no salve. He had fooled away his life in a country that had no need of him, from which he had derived no measure of spiritual profit. Strip the glamour of sheer scholarship from his interest in Chinese philosophy, and what remained? Scarcely anything that the heir of Western thought had not picked up in his child’s copybook. And whilst he was wasting his brain and his moral energies and his physical strength in pursuit of the shadows, the son of his loins, a human thing for whose moulding and development he was, by the laws of nature and civilization, responsible, had grown up, haphazard, fatherless, motherless, under alien guidance. He threw his memory back to his wife’s family, the Woodcotts, narrow-minded, bigoted, vulgar—Lord! how he had detested them. Had he abandoned his son to their untender mercies? No matter who had trained the boy, he himself had failed in the most elementary duty of mankind. Suddenly he raised both clenched fists and cried aloud: “By God! I swear——” Then suddenly he saw the ironical face of the village doctor of Water-End and heard his sarcastic words: “A bad habit. I should give it up”—and his arms dropped helpless by his sides. No. What was this oath but one more irretrievable plunge into the morass in which he floundered?