More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in
any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate
Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple,
sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence
betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.
And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Could
the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?

Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
was not despondent. For a month he had not permitted his mind to dwell
on the riddle; yet this morning he felt stirring within him a new energy
for which he could not account, a hope unconnected with any mental
process! He felt in touch, once more, faintly but perceptibly, with
something stable in the chaos. In bygone years he had not seen the
chaos, but the illusion of an orderly world, a continual succession of
sunrises, 'couleur de rose', from the heights above Bremerton. Now were
the scales fallen from his eyes; now he saw the evil, the injustice, the
despair; felt, in truth, the weight of the sorrow of it all, and yet that
sorrow was unaccountably transmuted, as by a chemical process, into
something which for the first time had a meaning--he could not say what
meaning. The sting of despair had somehow been taken out of it, and it
remained poignant!

Not on the obsession of the night before, when he had walked down Dalton
Street and beheld it transformed into a realm of adventure, but upon his
past life did he look back now with horror, upon the even tenor of those
days and years in the bright places. His had been the highroad of a