“Perhaps I have,” agreed Selden, in a low voice.
“Well, turn it over,” said the baron. He paused a moment, evidently in doubt whether to go on. “I am an old man,” he continued at last, “and I have seen a great deal of life; also I esteem you very highly—so you will permit me to say something which in another might seem an impertinence. It is this: do not fear to seize happiness when it comes your way; do not hesitate, or draw back, or run away. It is a rare thing, happiness—a very rare and fleeting thing; even at best, we can only hope to taste it briefly now and then. How silly, how cowardly to permit a single moment of it to escape! That,” he added, “is all I have learned in the sixty years that I have been on earth. But many men do not learn even that—not until it is too late!”
He sat for a moment longer looking at Selden with his wise old eyes; then he rose abruptly.
“Good-bye, my friend,” he said. “Till to-morrow—at eleven.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE UNLIT LAMP
IT was a decidedly nervous and shaken Selden who dressed for dinner that evening. For the first time in his life he had committed what is for a journalist the unpardonable sin—he had permitted his feelings to become involved in an affair which he had set himself to watch from the outside. He had ceased to be an observer and had become a participant.
Yet permitted was scarcely the word, for he seemed to have had no volition in the matter. He had been drawn in against his will. But, he told himself grimly, it was because his struggles to escape had been half-hearted. He might have saved himself had he heeded the first signals of danger. It was his cursed inability to make up his mind that had brought him to his present pass. He had dabbled with temptation—and now it was too late: the whirlpool had him!
No; that was not true either. Let him at least be man enough to be candid with himself: he could escape, even now, if he really wanted to. He had only to finish packing his bag, go to the station, get aboard the first train, and permit it to carry him away. But that was such a cowardly thing to do.
“Oh, own up, you idiot!” he groaned between his teeth. “It’s not because it is cowardly you don’t do it! Own up! It’s because you don’t want to escape!”
And, staring at himself in the glass, he realized that this was the truth—he had got down to it at last. He didn’t want to escape. It was finished. He might still struggle a little in an instinctive sort of way, but unless some power outside himself seized him and threw him clear....