“That’s where I bruised my hands when I clenched on the table, yonder.  You wouldn’t think it, maybe, but I love pictures.  I’ve spent a lot of time looking for them and at them.  I remember one collection—­many pictures of the martyrs, horrors in art, nightmares.  Here was a man disemboweled—­they wound his very bowels about a windlass, before his eyes, and at each turn—­I could see it written in the picture—­they asked him, did he yield at last, did he agree, did he consent. . . .  Then they wound again.  Here another man was on an iron chair, flames under him.  Now and then they asked him.  Should they put out the flames and hear him say he had foresworn his cause?  Again, there was a man whom they had shot full of arrows, one by one, little by little, and they asked him, now and then, if he foreswore his faith. . . .  But I knew he would not—­I knew these had not. . . .

“That’s the way it is,” he said slowly.  “That’s what you’re seeing now.  These scars on my fingers came cheap.  I reckon they’ve got to run deeper, clean down into my heart.  Yet you’re saying that now I begin to pay.  Yes.  When I pay, I’m going to pay.  And I’m not going to take my martyrdom for immediate sake of any crown, either.  There is none for me.  I reckon I sinned too far against one of God’s angels.  I reckon it’s maybe just lasting hell for me, and not a martyrdom with an end to it some time.  That’s how I’ve got to pay.

“Now, do you want me to tell you all the rest?”

She would not answer, and he resumed.

“Do you want me to tell what you’ve maybe heard, about this house?  Do you want me to tell whose garments those were that you saw?  Do you want my past?  Do you want to see my bowels dragged out before your eyes?  Do you want to turn the wheel with your own hands?  Do you want me to pay, that way?”

She went to him swiftly, put a hand on his arm.

“No!” said she.  “What I want you to believe is that it’s life makes us pay, that it’s God makes us pay.

“I want you to believe, too,” she went on after a time, “that we need neither of us be cheap.  I’m not going to ask you one thing, I’m not going to listen to one word.  You must not speak.  I must go.  It’s just because I must go that I shall not allow you to speak.”

“Is my debt to you paid, then?” His voice trembled.

“So far as it runs to me, it is paid.”

“What remains?”

“Nothing but the debt of yourself to yourself.  I’m going to look back to a strange chapter in my life—­a life which has had some strange ones.  I’m not going to be able to forget, of course, what you’ve said to me.  A woman loves to be loved.  When I go, I go; but I want to look back, now and then, and see you still paying, and getting richer with each act of courage, when you pay, to yourself, not me.”

“Ah! fanatic.  Ah! visionary.  Ah! dreamer, dreamer.  And you!”