in her presence, and, it might be, less perilous.  At least he could be quiet there.  His mind traveled back to a by-gone incident of his parochial life, when he had found a wretched shop-boy crouching by the water’s edge, and trying to screw his courage up for the final plunge.  It was a sordid little tragedy—­an honest lad was caught in the toils of some slatternly Jezebel; she had made him steal for her, had spent his spoil, and then deserted him for his “pal”—­his own familiar friend.  Adrift on the world, beggared in character and fortune, and sore to the heart, he had wandered to the edge of the water, and listened to its low-voiced promises of peace.  Stafford had stretched forth his hand to pluck him from his doom and set him on his feet; he prevailed on the lad to go home in his company, and the course of a few days proved once again that despair may be no more enduring than delight.  The incident had almost faded from his memory, but it revived now as he stood and looked on the water, and he recognized with a start the depths to which he was in danger of falling.  The invitation of the water could not draw him to it till he knew Claudia’s will.  But if she failed him, was not that the only thing left?  His desire had swallowed up his life, and seemed to point to death as the only alternative to its own satisfaction.  He contemplated this conclusion, not with the personal interest of a man who thought he might be called to act upon it,—­Claudia would rescue him from that,—­but with a theoretical certainty that if by any chance the staff on which he leant should break, he would be in no other mind than that from which he had rescued his miserable shop-boy.  Death for love’s sake was held up in poetry and romance as a thing in some sort noble and honorable; as a man might die because he could not save his country, so might he because he could not please his lady-love.  In old days, Stafford, rigidly repressing his aesthetic delight in such literature, had condemned its teaching with half-angry contempt, and enough of his former estimate of things remained to him to prevent him regarding such a state of mind as it pictured as a romantic elevation rather than a hopeless degradation of a man’s being.  But although he still condemned, now he understood, if not the defense of such an attitude, at least the existence of it.  He might still think it a folly; it no longer appeared a figment.  A sin it was, no doubt, and a degradation, but not an enormity or an absurdity; and when he tried again to fancy his life without Claudia, he struggled in vain against the growing conviction that the pictures he had condemned as caricatures of humanity had truth in them, and that it might be his part to prove it.