My reflections as I walked had borne it in upon me how rash, how mad had been my desperate action, and with bitterness I realized that I had destroyed the last chance of ever mending matters.
Not even the payment of my wager and my return in my true character could avail me now.

The payment of my wager, forsooth! Even that lost what virtue it might have contained.

Where was the heroism of such an act?
Had I not failed, indeed?
And was not, therefore, the payment of my wager become inevitable?
Fool! fool! Why had I not profited that gentle mood of hers when we had drifted down the stream together?
Why had I not told her then of the whole business from its ugly inception down to the pass to which things were come, adding that to repair the evil I was going back to Paris to pay my wager, and that when that was done, I would return to ask her to become my wife?
That was the course a man of sense would have adopted.
He would have seen the dangers that beset him in my false position, and would have been quick to have forestalled them in the only manner possible.
Heigh-ho! It was done.

The game was at an end, and I had bungled my part of it like any fool.

One task remained me--that of meeting Marsac at Grenade and doing justice to the memory of poor Lesperon.