cost what it may. . . ."

"Well?"

"To approach you again, to win your forgiveness, to touch your heart,
to......"

"Let him dare" exclaimed Paula lifting her hand with a threatening
gesture.

"And when he, gifted as he is in every way, has found his better self
again and can come forward purified and worthy of the approbation of the
best. . . ."

"Still I will never, never forget how he has sinned and what he brought
upon me!--Do you think that I have already forgotten your conversation
with Neforis? You ask nothing of your friends but honest feeling akin to
your own,--and what is it that repels me from Orion but feeling?
Thousands have altered their behavior, but--answer me frankly--surely not
what we mean by their feeling?"

"Yes, that too," said the leech with stern gravity. "Feeling, too, may
change. Or do you range yourself on the side of the Arab merchant and
his fellow-Moslems, who regard man as the plaything of a blind Fate?--
But our spiritual teachers tell us that the evil to which we are
predestined, which is that born into the world with us, may be averted,
turned and guided to good by what they call spiritual regeneration. But
who that lives in the tumult of the world can ever succeed in 'killing
himself' in their sense of the word, in dying while yet he lives, to be
born again, a new man? The penitent's garb does not suit the stature of