perty of Le Duc. That comes of having gone into politics, from which I am
also running away. It is  the one  thing in which I really excel. That, too,
is an attribute of Scaramouche."
     "Why will you always be deriding yourself?" she wondered.
     "Because I  recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You
wouldn't  have me take it seriously?  I should lose my  reason utterly  if I
did; especially since discovering my parents."
     "Don't, Andre!" she begged him. "You are insincere, you know."
     "Of course I am.  Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is  the
very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in  it,
we live by it; and we rarely realize it. You have seen it rampant and out of
hand in France during the past four years -  cant and hypocrisy on the  lips
of the revolutionaries, cant and hypocrisy on  the lips  of the upholders of
the  old  regime;  a riot of hypocrisy out of which  in the  end is begotten
chaos. And I who criticize it all on this beautiful God-given morning am the
rankest  and  most  contemptible  hypocrite  of  all.  It  was  this  -  the
realization of  this  truth kept me awake all  night. For  two  years I have
persecuted by every means in my power... M. de La Tour d'Azyr."
     He  paused before uttering  the name, paused  as if hesitating  how  to
speak of him.
     "And in those two years I  have  deceived myself as to the motive  that
was  spurring me. He spoke of  me last night as the evil genius of his life,
and  himself he recognized the justice of this. It may be that he was right,
and because of that it is  probable that even had he not  killed Philippe de
Vilmorin,  things would still have been the same. Indeed, to-day I know that
they  must  have been.  That  is why  I  call  myself  a hypocrite, a  poor,
self-duping hypocrite."
     "But why, Andre?"
     He  stood still  and looked  at  her.  "Because he  sought  you, Aline.
Because  in  that alone  he must have  found me  ranged against him, utterly
intransigeant. Because of that I must have strained every nerve to bring him
down - so as to save you from becoming the prey of your own ambition.
     "I wish to speak of him no more than I must. After this, I  trust never
to speak of him again. Before the lines of our lives crossed, I knew him for
what he  was, I knew the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I
found him detestable. You heard him allude last  night to the unfortunate La
Binet.  You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode  of life,
his rearing.  To that there  is no answer, I  suppose. He  conforms to type.
Enough! But to me, he was  the embodiment  of evil, just as  you have always
been  the  embodiment of good; he was the embodiment of sin, just as you are
the  embodiment of purity. I had enthroned you  so high, Aline, so high, and
yet no  higher than  your place.  Could I,  then,  suffer that you should be
dragged down by ambition,  could I suffer the evil  I detested to mate  with
the good I  loved? What could have  come of it but  your own damnation, as I
told you that day at Gavrillac? Because of that my detestation of him became
a personal, active thing. I resolved to save you at all costs from a fate so
horrible. Had you been able to tell me that you loved him it would have been
different. I should have hoped that in a union sanctified by  love you would
have raised him  to your own pure heights. But that out of considerations of
worldly advancement you should lovelessly consent to mate with him... Oh, it
was vile and hopeless.  And so I fought him - a rat fighting a lion - fought
him relentlessly until I saw that  love  had come to  take in your heart the
place of ambition. Then I desisted."
     "Until you  saw  that love had taken the place of  ambition!" Tears had
been gathering in her eyes whilst he was  speaking. Now amazement eliminated
her emotion. "But when did you see that? When?"
     "I -  I was mistaken. I know it now. Yet, at the time... surely, Aline,
that  morning when you came to beg me not  to keep my engagement with him in
the Bois, you were moved by concern for him?"
     "For him! It was concern for you," she cried, without thinking what she
said.
     But  it did  not  convince  him. "For me?  When you knew - when all the
world knew what I had been doing daily for a week!"
     "Ah, but  he,  he  was  different from  the  others  you  had  met. His
reputation stood  high. My uncle accounted him  invincible; he persuaded  me
that if you met nothing could save you."
     He looked at her frowning.
     "Why this, Aline?"  he asked her with some sternness. "I can understand
that,  having  changed  since then,  you should  now  wish  to disown  those
sentiments. It is a woman's way, I suppose."
     "Oh,  what are you saying, Andre? How wrong  you are! It is the truth I
have told you!"
     "And was it concern for me," he asked her, "that laid you swooning when
you saw him return wounded from the meeting? That was what opened my eyes."
     "Wounded?  I  had  not  seen  his  wound. I  saw  him sitting alive and
apparently unhurt in his caleche, and  I concluded that he had killed you as
he had said he would. What else could I conclude?"
     He  saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared  him. He  fell back, a
hand to his brow. "And that was why you fainted?" he asked incredulously.
     She looked at him without answering. As she began  to realize how  much
she  had been swept  into saying by her eagerness  to make  him  realize his
error, a sudden fear came creeping into her eyes.
     He held out both hands to her.
     "Aline! Aline!" His voice broke on the name. "It was I... "
     "0 blind Andre, it was always you - always! Never, never did I think of
him, not even  for loveless marriage, save once for  a little while, when...
when that theatre girl came  into  your  life, and then... "  She broke off,
shrugged, and  turned her head away. "I thought of following ambition, since
there was nothing left to follow."
     He shook  himself. "I  am  dreaming, of course,  or else  I am mad," he
said.
     "Blind, Andre; just blind," she assured him.
     "Blind only where it would have been presumption to have seen."
     "And yet," she  answered him with a flash of  the Aline he had known of
old, "I have never found you lack presumption."
     M.  de Kercadiou,  emerging a  moment later  from  the  library window,
beheld them holding hands and staring each at the other, beatifically, as if
each saw Paradise in the other's face.