When Will Harcourt had answered Roma Fronde’s confiding and affectionate note by a letter of vague confession and final renunciation, he looked upon his own life as “done and finished,” so far as any hope in the future was concerned.
What had he to live for?
Roma, his adored, his ideal woman, his muse, his goddess, was lost to him forever! was worse than lost, for she was repulsed, repudiated, and by himself.
His youthful ambition was gone forever; was worse than gone, for it was turned to humiliation, and by his own act.
Oh, misery! Oh, misery!
What had he to live for, indeed?
What?
For one bitter end! To expiate his sin! To toil hard at the roughest sort of work, among honest laborers, with whom he did not feel good enough to associate, to look forward to nothing better than the coming of that bitter day which should deprive him of his only friend in the death of his aged mother, and leave him free to deliver his conscience of his guilty secret, nay, constrain him to denounce himself as a criminal, to give himself up to justice, to be dealt with according to law, to suffer—what penalty?
Imprisonment, with penal servitude, for the term of his natural life, must be the lightest doom that could be meted out to him, as the measure of his great offense.
For the term of his natural life. And he was but twenty-four years old! A half century of imprisonment and penal slavery.