sat down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and
plunging down towards Lens until he was out of sight.

"Now," said Benham to himself, "if I do not go back along the planks
my secret honour is gone for ever."

He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well,
that the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a
very good chance indeed of getting killed. Then it came to him
suddenly as a clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain,
that it is better to get killed than go away defeated by such fears
and unsteadiness as his. The change came into his mind as if a
white light were suddenly turned on--where there had been nothing
but shadows and darkness. He rose to his feet and went swiftly and
intently the whole way back, going with a kind of temperate
recklessness, and, because he was no longer careful, easily. He
went on beyond his starting place toward the corner, and did that
supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was falling away,
and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he recrossed the
Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to the
crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.

After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but
instead he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear
above incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to
slippery footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the
middle and headed him down and down. . . .

The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those
dreams like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path