When Francis Armour left his wife's room he did not go to his own, but
quietly descended the stairs, went to the library, and sat down. The
loneliest thing in the world is to be tete-a-tete with one's conscience.
A man may have a bad hour with an enemy, a sad hour with a friend, a
peaceful hour with himself, but when the little dwarf, conscience,
perches upon every hillock of remembrance and makes slow signs--those
strange symbols of the language of the soul--to him, no slave upon the
tread-mill suffers more.

The butler came in to see if anything was required, but Armour only
greeted him silently and waved him away. His brain was painfully alert,
his memory singularly awake. It seemed that the incident of this hour
had so opened up every channel of his intelligence that all his life ran
past him in fantastic panorama, as by that illumination which comes to
the drowning man. He seemed under some strange spell. Once or twice he
rose, rubbed his eyes, and looked round the room--the room where as a boy
he had spent idle hours, where as a student he had been in the hands of
his tutor, and as a young man had found recreations such as belong to
ambitious and ardent youth. Every corner was familiar. Nothing was
changed. The books upon the shelves were as they were placed twenty
years ago. And yet he did not seem a part of it. It did not seem
natural to him. He was in an atmosphere of strangeness--that atmosphere
which surrounds a man, as by a cloud, when some crisis comes upon him and
his life seems to stand still, whirling upon its narrow base, while the
world appears at an interminable distance, even as to a deaf man who sees
yet cannot hear.

There came home to him at that moment with a force indescribable the
shamelessness of the act he committed four years ago. He had thought to
come back to miserable humiliation. For four years he had refused to do