I was able to afford him consolation. He wanted a belief in the hereafter. Yet-" The pause was significant. I refrained from picking up the suggestion. The friar sighed and rubbed his jowl.

"What would you think," he demanded, half humorously, "if a man like that should inquire how to commit the unpardonable sin ?"

It was horrible, as if a friendly face had suddenly shown signs of mortal decay. I did not know what to think. The thing was preposterous. I looked at the friar. He encountered my eye, to dispel unbelief, pointed to the crucifix on his bosom. "And he is not mad," was his addition.

"Then nothing can be done," I said. "Nothing," he affirmed. Apparently we had opened our minds to no purpose. In this bazaar we had met like jurors called from their shops to sit at an inquest. We had rendered an equivocal verdict and our casual association was to be dissolved forever. I took out my cigar case and offered it to him. The friar hesitated, then grasped my intention before I realized what I was doing. He drew out a cigar with a fat thumb and forefinger. "You Americans!" he ejaculated. As the huge white and green hat of a Korean priest topped the stream of chaffering natives a mode of expression seemed to discover itself. He pointed it out silently, then brought into our survey by another gesture the bedizened figure of a Japanese officer swaggering under a gilded cap surmounted by a nodding pom-pom. "There can be truces between religions as between nations," he said, with a kindly touch of the brogue. "But, after all-" He fell to contemplating his crucifix. The hitherto unheard noises of the bazaar rose around us. A little native boy, catching the glint of the symbol in the friar's hand, stopped in his erratic career to gaze up at it. The friar thrust out his fingers over the heathen head. "God bring thee to a knowledge of himself," he blessed him, "and give thee a joyous faith." Then he touched me, pontifically.

"Who can say that the young man is seeking an evil end? Did not our Lord descend into hell to save?"

With this he left me speechless, watching his sedate form moving up the gay,

narrow street between the stalls hung with merchandise. As I lost him, it seemed mightily that he had, with the oblique scruples of his calling, yet made excuse for Feinnes, no longer of this world of ours.

I thought over it fully, carefully. I took what the priest had said of Feinnes' desire, what Feinnes had hinted at and I seemed, at last, to see his purpose. He loved the woman and was going into her hell to save her. I saw clearly his difficulties; his own decency, his upbringing, his steadfast hold on traditions-the impossibility, of his own strength, of his descending. I even pictured to myself, gently, the woman-weak, clinging amid sin to the love of a good and wholesome man, yet dragging him down into the mire, filling his nostrils with the disgusting perfumes of the unspeakable pit, holding his brave hand in the clamor of hell. And, failing hope of rescuing her, he had tried to bring himself to a determination to stay with her always, to sacrifice himself that she might know that his love was strong.

It was not pleasant. It recalled to me what had been said so often: that a woman makes or mars a man; that if a man fail, by whatever vices, it is because some woman-women-he has known have failed in their task. And here was a woman unequal to herself, dragging Feinnes down into the abyss. I put it out of my mind.

Two years passed and I had relegated the thought of Feinnes to the darkness. I had settled it in my mind that he was blessedly gone from me, that he had taken with him a kindly feeling and so I had fulfilled the demands of old friendship. But he came upon me as I sat high above the beach at the Cliff House in San Francisco. I was sunning myself in the balcony at Sutro Heights, watching a barque get her offing into the Pacific.

"You passed me on the Terrace," he "He said, "so I thought I'd follow you." He seated himself in the warmth, waiting for me to respond, expectant as a man with his finger in a book that he shall shortly return to.

By an effort I greeted him familiarly. I called him "old man," and, when it was said, found myself at a loss.

"Eight years is a long time, isn't it?" he said.

"I saw you two years ago," was my response. "Are you going back home?"

His eyes dropped wearily. "No one can understand," he murmured. The tone was dry, as if he had, by repetition, seasoned the phrase. To my glance he was immensely aged, his face purged of its youth, his limbs hardened. The clothes on his back were good, but he wore them negligently. After all, however, it was Feinnes. The gray eyes steadied when he spoke. It struck me that he must have suffered the more keenly because of his inherent decency. He had neither gone to the bad, nor fully recovered himself. "Tell me," I said, "why didn't you go with the woman?"

He looked at me, as if his sight were dim. My wicked desire was to throw him to one side or the other, to make him cease tottering upright. I was angry that he had found no rest, that he was still, though waveringly, erect, throwing an uneasy shadow upon myself and the others of whom he had been one. "Wouldn't you be happier to go to hell with her? Better off to get what happiness you could?" I insisted.

He cast his eyes down upon the wrinkled sea. My words had wakened in him a feeling for himself, it appeared to me; had recalled old reckonings long thrown aside. When he spoke it was in a whisper. "That was impossible," he said. "I was too late. Maybe I wouldn't have done so, after all."

For an instant I was shaken from my hold on commonplaces. The material Feinnes had been burned into a wisp and this blackened tissue was a sport, in our common shape, to invisible winds. His gyrations were incalculable; his bourne past knowledge. Then I grasped at fact again, tried to catch this derelict from the inscrutable currents of Fate. "Then why didn't you forget it all, stick to leather and findings, be a man?"

"All I could think of," he explained. slowly, "was about the price of oak-tanned leather. Even that varied, but I knew the limits. It was quite impossible to think of what she told me. I had no mind to make up on it." Feinnes put out his hand toward me and withdrew it hastily, as if he, after all, had strength enough.

"It wasn't a nice story, you see. The

next evening after we landed from the barque, I sat on the little ledge below Tajiro's tea-garden. I was trying to think. I saw a fat armed man rowing in a quarter-boat away from a ship some ways out. He saw me and turned his boat clumsily, splashing his oars. He was excited. When the boat's stem bumped the ledge he threw a line over my shoulder. The wet strands flicked my cheek. 'God! look wot I found!' he said.

"What?" I asked him.

"He pointed a fat hand, trembling, over the stern of the small boat. 'Pull in on that line,' he said hoarsely."

Here Feinnes entwined the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other and thrust them between his knees, staring the while down on the crowd of tourists at the Cliff. "I pulled in," he went on. "Something swirled at the other end, then rubbed the ledge where I was kneeling. The water about her was very blue and it—it held her-kindly.”

I saw it all instantly: the gross creature shivering in his boat, the blue wave lapping the rocky ledge, Feinnes staring down at a woman's body. I was again in the shadow of his ruin. I was chilled through. I must gain sunlight. "Suicide?" I cried, "Did you kill her?"

He did not hear me. He turned his eyes to the open sea. "It was so strange," he muttered, "to be there when I was a member of a leather firm in Pittsburg. She hid her face from me, but a hand was out from under her dress. It was so white, so clean."

"Well," I said, giving up to him.

"My father-the people in Pittsburg, would not have understood. They would have said she was not-clean. You know father was a Princeton man-Feinnes, '53. He was very proud of my being Feinnes II. But I, I could understand."

It was past reasoning upon. The factors were so enormous that I could not handle them. I sat like a student that had been flunked for life and listened to the barking of the seals on the rocks below. "So you quit the firm ?" I said finally, hitting at random.

"I felt I must. She had cleared it up for me. Then you know, the name?" "What of the name?" I shouted. "Don't talk riddles."

He tasted his tongue awhile. "I did

not want to give it up. I could not. It means a lot to the family-to my father." "But what better way than to go back? To start again?" My wrath was heating.

He pointed his thumb over his shoulder as we faced the Pacific. "For thousands of miles back there they believe in heaven and hell," he explained. "We both came from there she and I-and you. It wouldn't be honorable to give it up for personal reasons. Don't you see? I'm Feinnes. I mustn't give up the name. I must keep it and yet I must keep it honorably. Would it be honorable to desert her? And yet it wouldn't be honorable to stay in the firm, you see, when father wouldn't understand my position. She made it all clear. She killed herself."

I fell into a deep amazement. I had almost a sense that I myself was here convicted of abandoning the faith of my fathers. "What do you mean?" I demanded.

Before he answered, his attitude again carried it in upon me that this conversation was only an episode in his inner life, momentous as it was outwardly, this conversation with me who represented visibly society-the people to whom, after all, he must give account. But he rested impatient, as if his finger were still in the place in the book to which he must. return immediately. "Lots of men talk about spirits and souls and queer immortalities," he resumed. "I never believe those things. I never could understand them. In college, you know, the fellows spoke a deal of philosophy. But that's not the thing that counts. I looked down into the blue water below Tajiro's teagarden. There was only she and I, and the past and the future. She had made it perfectly plain. I couldn't get away from the facts." He suddenly straightened out his figure above me, his arms rigid in his sleeves. "Perfectly plain," he repeated.

If his eyes saw something unseen by mine, I wished to view it. I realized that I was nearer comprehension than ever before. The image of Feinnes kneeling over blue water, looking upon a white hand, was almost a solution. "How is it plain?" I demanded.

"You remember what we used to say

in Princeton? Never to tell a lie-" "Except for a woman's sake," I finished.

His eyes softened, turned on me for the moment. "I knew I hadn't forgot," he breathed. "You see, that made it all plain. I loved her. I couldn't deny it— lie about it, could I? And I couldn't go home and say the untruth-it wouldn't have been for her sake, but for my own. And she" his chest swelled under his jacket-"she loved me. She went to hell for my sake, that I might do a clean thing. A man can't go back on a woman. She had done it all for me."

Vivid triumph lay in his last words. It was the seal on the matter. For an instant I saw a depth before me, immeasureable, hideous. "Yes," I assented; "of

I

"That's it," he went on presently, seated again. "Nothing else would do. understood perfectly. I must do the right thing for both of us in this world, play the game through. So I did it, lived on, because it would be cowardly to die as I wanted to would have been weak; and when I join her, she'll need all my strength. It's very, very hard," he said, quietly, to my unbelief. "But it won't last much longer and then-"

He was hushed. I glanced covertly at him. His eyes shone. It was awful to see a tear course down his bronzed cheek, to see the mouth shake under the beard. "Cheer up," I said emptily.

He made no response till, in pure nervous irritation, I got up to my feet. He rose, too, like an old man, and went away. As he passed down the windings of the balcony I tried to call out a word of farewell, for the sake of old Feinnes. I do not think I uttered a sound, but he turned and came back a step. "I wish my father could understand," he said. With this he departed for good from the open world into mystery, into the darkness of his passion.

As he went I realized the depth of his breeding, the childlike faith he had in the religion of our fathers, which decrees that the wages of sin is death, which denies to the fallen any hope in this life, which binds us to duty, to belief, to ourselves. To him, the woman was forever in hell, gone thither stormily, with tears, because she loved him, and love was, for

her, always sin. And I seemed to see that he was renouncing his own salvation, because, after all, even in the presence of God, a man-can not be traitor to his love, can not abandon the woman, must be a gentleman!

A year later I was sent down to an equatorial islet to survey a wreck. It was a clear case of bad seamanship on the part of a drunken captain. The barque was a total loss, and a day finished my business. I had a week to wait for the return of the steamer that had landed me there, and as the crew of the barque were living in some hollows on the lee side of the islet, which was desolate, I went over that night to stay with them. Propped up in the sand, a little apart from their camp, lay the second mate, injured in the wreck, they told me, while striving to repair the damage. It was Feinnes, and he was dying. He greeted me cheerfully as he took my hand and held it. "You know I said it couldn't last long," he said.

I fixed myself for the night beside him. Then I lit my pipe and asked him if there was anything he wished me to do. "Nothing," he replied, "but to let me feel your hand. You see one side of me is paralyzed, and I can't hold my own."

I put my hand over, and he clasped it gently. The Southern Cross blazed down from the zenith: the sea spread darkly beyond the triple line of the surf. There was no wind, no movement in the air. Possibly an hour had passed when Feinnes spoke. "Nine years is a long time," he murmured.

"I wonder how old Witherspoon looks," I said, for lack of better. The memories of college days seemed to sweep pleasantly over the dying man. He recalled an old scene, repeated an old jest. But his hand. grew chilly in mine. His voice ceased and I saw his eyes, upturned to the stars, shining with tears. The shadow creeping over us again. I wondered if eternity held for him the realization of purpose, or only disillusion. He

was

twisted painfully on his couch in the sand.

"The Southern Cross," he whispered. "I wonder if it would not have been less cruel than the Northern faith?"

There was nothing for me to say. I tried to clasp his chill hand more warmly. "It seems too bad," he resumed, after a little, "that she was-was-lost. She was so tender. That night on the barque, she cried. I think she cried before she -she made it all plain."

The deep mouthed surf sent its bellow over the islet and Feinnes stirred. "I'm afraid it's been hard on her-where she is. You know she's a woman.

A man can stand hell so much better. But we must take the right road, and we mustn't be too much-afraid."

I tried to quiet him, but I was powerless. "To think," he broke out, "of her standing all that punishment for me. And I couldn't go to her. I couldn't be a coward that way. Father would understand that."

I grasped his arm and steadied him. I caught his eyes in the dusk. The old soberness was in them. "Old man," I urged, "you're dying. Can't you prayor something?"

"No, I've been fighting alone on the other side. It would have been easier if I could have sinned the unpardonable sin. A man's training won't let him do some things. My chance is coming now."

He closed his eyes. His bearded lips. quivered. quivered. "It's hard to resist salvation," he whispered. "It's. offered to you on every corner of the world. That's why I kept to the sea. I might have given in. I used to want to kill the missionaries. They would have saved me, and I'd have lost her, left her alone when she needs Come Come unto me, ye who are weary and He struggled up in my arms. His voice rose clear and quick and strong: "Not coming, Lord!"

me.

He fell back, and I laid him on the sand and went away.