Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north. A conscience was
a luxury for a rich man. Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon
of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions,
breed its own results.

It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now
for weeks. Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had
bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which
had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a
flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her
with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.

Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was
covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without
taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.

But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him
through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker
forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and
mockery.

Very well, then; he would tell Diane of the yellowed paper; he would
tell her to-night. However he played the game there was gold at the
end.

He laughed suddenly and shrugged and swept erratically into a lighter
mood of impudence and daring. There was rain beating furiously in his
face and his hair was wet. Well, the car pounding along beneath him
had known many such nights of storm and wild adventure. It had pleased