“And Betty?” said I.

He held out his hand in a gesture that was almost piteous.

“I could tear her from my life.  I had no alternative.  In the tearing I hurt her cruelly.  To know it was not the least of the burning hell I lit for myself.  But I couldn’t tear her from my heart.  When a brute beast like me does love a woman purely and ideally, it’s a desperate business.  It means God’s Heaven to him, while it means only an earthly paradise to the ordinary man.  It clutches hold of the one bit of immortal soul he has left, and nothing in this world can make it let go.  That’s why I say it’s a desperate business.”

“Yes, I can understand,” said I.

“I schooled myself to the loss of her.  It was part of my punishment.  But now she has come back into my life.  Fate has willed it so.  Does it mean that I am forgiven?”

“By whom?” I asked.  “By God?”

“By whom else?”

“How dare man,” said I, “speak for the Almighty?”

“How is man to know?”

“That’s a hard question,” said I.  “I can only think of answering it by saying that a man knows of God’s forgiveness by the measure of the Peace of God in his soul.”

“There’s none of it in mine, my dear chap, and never will be,” said Boyce.

I strove to help him.  For what other purpose had he come to me?

“You think then that the sending of Betty is a sign and a promise?  Yes.  Perhaps it is.  What then?”

“I must accept it as such,” said he.  “If there is a God, He would not give me back the woman I love, only to take her away again.  What shall I do?”

“In what way?” I asked.

“She offered to marry me.  I am to give her my answer to-morrow.  If I were the callous, murdering brute that everyone would have the right to believe I am, I shouldn’t have hesitated.  If I hadn’t been a tortured, damned soul,” he cried, bringing his great fist down on the bed, “I shouldn’t have come here to ask you what my answer can be.  My whole being is infected with horror.”  He rose and stood over the bed and, with clenched hands, gesticulated to the wall in front of him.  “I’m incapable of judging.  I only know that I crave her with everything in me.  I’ve got it in my brain that she’s my soul’s salvation.  Is my brain right?  I don’t know.  I come to you—­a clean, sweet man who knows everything—­I don’t think there’s a crime on my conscience or a foulness in my nature which I haven’t confessed to you.  You can judge straight as I can’t.  What answer shall I give to-morrow?”

Did ever man, in a case of conscience, have a greater responsibility?  God forgive me if I solved it wrongly.  At any rate, He knows that I was uninfluenced by mean personal considerations.  All my life I have tried to have an honourable gentleman and a Christian man.  According to my lights I saw only one clear course.