"You know very well that I am not a coward," he said.
"You will be, the day you are afraid to go on living," returned his friend. "If you kill yourself, I shall think you are an arrant coward, and I shall be sorry I ever knew you."
Guido looked at him incredulously.
"Are you in earnest?" he asked.
"Yes."
There was no mistaking the look in Lamberti's hard blue eyes. Guido faced him.
"Do you think that every man who commits suicide is a coward?"
"If it is to escape his own troubles, yes. A man who gives his life for his country, his mother, or his wife, is not a coward, though he may kill himself with his own hand."
"The Church would call him a suicide."
"I do not know, in all cases," said Lamberti. "I am not a theologian, and as the Church means nothing to you, it would be of no use if I were."