Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/376

374 times scared me into thinking you couldn't be human. I was afraid you only wanted to kill yourself."

"I did want to." Still Tempest spoke with his face hidden. "I knew that I had to see this thing in a larger way or I probably would." He broke off, sitting silent; and Dick walked through the room with his lips tight-shut. At last he touched Tempest on the shoulder.

"Here's your our medicine," he said. "Let me hold the glass. What do you expect me to think of a God or a Good that can let you suffer this way while I go free?"

Tempest looked up. His forehead was wet near the hair, and his eyes were very sad.

"Do you go free?" he asked.

Dick looked away. The blind battling soul in him desired intensely to cry out its doubts and troubles to this man. But his stubborn heart held him back. Besides, he told himself that he could not speak of Jennifer.

"I'd give my own strength to get yours back," he said.

"It will come back." Tempest smiled a little. "I'm not going to be laid on the shelf yet. And I owe you more than you owe me."

"What? Dick looked at him in sudden distrust.

"You did turn me back into the trail again. And I believe that you began to do it honestly. And I have no right to judge you. I have failed too far myself. I had thought that I could stand—and it needed her sorrow as well as mine to show me the only way in which I could stand. She had to pay so that I should learn, you see. I have got to do something with that learning."

"Tempest! Do you love her still as a man loves the woman he wants for his wife?"

Dick blurted the question out, half-afraid, half-desperate. With that paper in his pocket he knew that he must know this.

"No," said Tempest, very low. "Not that way any more."

He did not explain further. But Dick guessed, and he did not guess so very far wrong. Tempest loved Andree now for all that she was not. For all that an unripe and over-strenuous civilisation had made her. For all her kin