Here was what the world thought of him--he read the lines over again, his eyes scorching, but his finger steady, as it traced the lines slowly: "the obscure death..." "embezzled trustmoneys..." "the final seal of shame upon a misspent life!" These were the epitaphs on the tombstone of Charley Steele; dead and buried, out of sight, out of repute, soon to be out of mind and out of memory, save as a warning to others--an old example raked out of the dust-bin of time by the scavengers of morality, to toss at all who trod the paths of dalliance.
What was there to do?
Go back?
Go back and knock at Kathleen's door, another Enoch Arden, and say: "I have come to my own again ?" Return and tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more?
Break up this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced?
Summon Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to her all these years?
To what end?
What had he ever done for her that he might destroy her now?
What sort of Spartan tragedy was this, that the woman who had been the victim of circumstances, who had been the slave to a tie he never felt, yet which had been as iron-bound to her, should now be brought out to be mangled body and soul for no fault of her own?
What had she done?
What had she ever done to give him right to touch so much as a hair of her head?
Go back, and bring Billy to justice, and clear his own name?
Go back, and send Kathleen's brother, the forger, to jail?
What an achievement in justice! Would not the world have a right to say that the only decent thing he could do was to eliminate himself from the equation?
What profit for him in the great summing-up, that he was technically innocent of this one thing, and that to establish his innocence he broke a woman's heart and destroyed a boy's life?
To what end! It was the murderer coming back as a ghost to avenge himself for being hanged.
Suppose he went back--the death's-head at the feast--what would there be for himself afterwards; for any one for whom he was responsible?
Living at that price?
To die and end it all, to disappear from this petty life where he had done so little, and that little ill?
To die?
No.

There was in him some deep, if obscure, fatalism after all.

If he had been meant to die now, why had he not gone to the bottom of the river that yesterday at the Cote Dorion?
Why had he been saved by this yokel at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain hut, wrapped in silence and lost to the world?
Why had his brain and senses lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty consciousness?
Was it fate?
Did it not seem probable that the Great Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the shores of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door predestined for his eternal exit?
It was clear to him that death by his own hand was futile, and that if there were trap-doors set for him alone, it were well to wait until he trod upon them and fell through in his appointed hour in the movement of the Great Machine.
What to do--where to live--how to live?
He got slowly to his feet and took a step forward half blindly.

The man on the bench stirred.

Crossing the room he dropped a hand on the man's shoulder.