" And he gnashed his teeth as it dropped from between them.
"No, Edith, no. Heaven helping me, I will not subject you to this
temptation. I will not drag you down with me, and yet, save
Griswold, there lives not the person who knows my secret. May be
he could be bought. Oh, the maddening thought. Am I a demon or a
brute?" And he leaped from his chair, cursing himself again and
again for having fallen so low as to dream of an act fraught with
so much wrong to Edith, and so much treachery to one as fair, as
beautiful as she, and far, far more to be pitied.
Arthur St. Claire was, at heart, a noble, upright, honorable man,
and sure, at last, to choose the right, however rugged were the
road. For years he had groped in a darkness deeper, more hopeless
than that which enshrouded the blind man, and in all that time
there had shone upon his pathway not a single ray of daylight. The
past, at which he dared not look, lay behind him a dreary waste,
and the black future stretched out before him, years on years it
might be, in which there would be always the same old cankering
wound festering in his soul.
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