Here he would sit for hours, the long day ended, staring steadily at the blank wall, the gas-jet flickering overhead; and here, slowly, painfully, with doubt and hesitation, out of the moral confusion in his weary mind he evolved the theory of personal responsibility.
With narrowing eyes, from which slowly doubt faded, he gazed at duty with all the calm courage of his race, not at first recognising it as duty in its new and dreadful guise.
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.