What he longed for with an agonized desire was to stand once more stainless among his equals; to reach once more the liberty of unchallenged, unfettered life; to return once more to those who held him but as a dishonored memory, as one whom violent death had well snatched from the shame of a criminal career.
"But who would believe me now ?" he thought.

"Besides, this makes no difference.

If three words spoken would reinstate me, I could not speak them at that cost.

The beginning perhaps was folly, but for sheer justice sake there is no drawing back now.

Let him enjoy it; God knows I do not grudge him it." Yet, though it was true to the very core that no envy and no evil lay in his heart against the younger brother to whose lot had fallen all good gifts of men and fate, there was almost unbearable anguish on him in this hour in which he learned the inheritance that had come to him, and remembered that he could never take again even so much of it as lay in the name of his fathers.