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“I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters–but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on that plea? I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

“The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now … I’d been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his future hung on my verdict–we’d tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript lay between us, on my table–a novel, his first novel, if you please!–and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at me with all his life in the look.

“I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his face and on the manuscript.

“‘The fact is, my dear Gilbert,’ I began–

“I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

“‘Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow! I’m not so awfully cut up as all that!’ His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.

“He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily longed to prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert–

“But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting myself in for if I didn’t tell the truth. I said to myself: ‘I shall have him for life’–and I’d never yet seen any one, man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in Gilbert’s arms.

“‘The thing’s all right, and you’re all wrong!’ I shouted up at him; and as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous clutch, I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy has its charms–

“Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions, and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what their after-taste would be–so many of the finest don’t keep! Still, I wasn’t sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it did turn a trifle flat.

“After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his eyes–his blissful eyes… Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk–and there were the other eyes…

“It was three years since I’d seen them, but I’d thought of them so often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them … As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I’d seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can’t tell you how the fact added to their horror …