But night after night, patiently perplexed, he retraced his errant pathway through life, back to the source of doubt and pain; and, once arrived there, he remained, gazing with impartial eyes upon the ruin two young souls had wrought of their twin lives; and always, always somehow, confronting him among the debris, rose the spectre of their deathless responsibility to one another; and the inexorable life-sentence sounded ceaselessly in his ears:  “For better or for worse—­for better or for worse—­till death do us part—­till death—­till death!”

Dreadful his duty—­for man already had dared to sunder them, and he had acquiesced to save her in the eyes of the world!  Dreadful, indeed—­because he knew that he had never loved her, never could love her!  Dreadful—­doubly dreadful—­for he now knew what love might be; and it was not what he had believed it when he executed the contract which must bind him while life endured.

Once, and not long since, he thought that, freed from the sad disgrace of the shadowy past, he had begun life anew.  They told him—­and he told himself—­that a man had that right; that a man was no man who stood stunned and hopeless, confronting the future in fetters of conscience.  And by that token he had accepted the argument as truth—­because he desired to believe it—­and he had risen erect and shaken himself free of the past—­as he supposed; as though the past, which becomes part of us, can be shaken from tired shoulders with the first shudder of revolt!

No; he understood now that the past was part of him—­as his limbs and head and body and mind were part of him.  It had to be reckoned with—­what he had done to himself, to the young girl united to him in bonds indissoluble except in death.

That she had strayed—­under man-made laws held guiltless—­could not shatter the tie.  That he, blinded by hope, had hoped to remake a life already made, and had dared to masquerade before his own soul as a man free to come, to go, and free to love, could not alter what had been done.  Back, far back of it all lay the deathless pact—­for better or for worse.  And nothing man might wish or say or do could change it.  Always, always he must remain bound by that, no matter what others did or thought; always, always he was under obligations to the end.

And now, alone, abandoned, helplessly sick, utterly dependent upon the decency, the charity, the mercy of her legal paramour, the young girl who had once been his wife had not turned to him in vain.

Before the light of her shaken mind had gone out she had written him, incoherently, practically in extremis; and if he had hitherto doubted where his duty lay, from that moment he had no longer any doubt.  And very quietly, hopelessly, and irrevocably he had crushed out of his soul the hope and promise of the new life dawning for him above the dead ashes of the past.

* * * * *

It was not easy to do; he had not ended it yet.  He did not know how.  There were ties to be severed, friendships to be gently broken, old scenes to be forgotten, memories to kill.  There was also love—­to be disposed of.  And he did not know how.