Ernshaw rose slowly from his seat. His face seemed to Vane to be transfigured. He looked him straight in the eyes, and said, in a voice only a little above a whisper, and yet thrilling with an intense emotion:
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain! You have asked for my advice and my guidance, Maxwell. I have given them to you, but not before I have sought for advice and counsel from an infinitely higher Source. I believe I have had my answer. As I have had it so I have given it to you. I have spent a good many hours thinking over this problem of yours—and a harder problem few men have ever had to solve—but my fixed and settled conviction is that during this last conversation of yours with Miss Raleigh you bore yourself like a man; you did your duty; you put your hand to the plough. You are not going to look back now, are you?"
Vane dropped back into his seat and folded his hands over his eyes again, and said with a note of weariness in his voice:
"Well, yes, old man, I suppose you're right, and yet, Ernshaw, it's very hard, so hard that it seems almost impossible. They're coming up to 'Commem' to-morrow—I was obliged to ask them, you know. I should only have to hold out my hand and feel hers in it and say that—well, that I'd thought better of it, and everything would be just as it was before. We could begin again just as if that had never happened.
"You know it's all I've thought about, all I've worked for, ever since we came back from India together. Honestly, old man, she really is—of course, with the exception of the Governor—everything there is in the world for me now. If I have to give her up, what else is there? You know what I was going to do. Now that I've got my degree I should have a splendid opening in the Foreign Office. The way would be absolutely clear before me—a mere matter of brains and interest—and I know I've got the interest—and I should be an Ambassador, perhaps a Prime Minister some day, and she would be my wife—and yet without her it wouldn't be worth anything to me. Ernshaw, isn't it a bit too much to ask a man on the threshold of his real life to give up all that for the sake of an idea—well, a scientific conviction if you like."
"Strait is the Gate, and Narrow is the Way!" exclaimed Ernshaw. He seemed to tower above him as he stood over his chair; Vane looked up and saw that his eyes were glowing and his features set. His lips and voice trembled as he spoke. His whole being seemed irradiated by the light of an almost divine enthusiasm.
"Maxwell, will you be one of the few that find it, or one of the many that miss it, and take the other way? As a good Christian, as the son of a Christian man, you know where that one leads to.
"After all, Maxwell," he continued, more quietly, "the trials of life are like lessons in school. You needed this experience or you would not have got it. In every fight you must win or lose. In this one you can and must be the victor. I think, nay, I know, that I am pointing out to you the way to victory, the way to final triumph over all the evils that have forced you to a choice between following your own most worthy inclinations, and what you now think an intolerable misery and an impossible sacrifice."
He held out his hand as he spoke. Vane did not know it at the time, but in reality it was a hand held out to save a drowning man. It was a moment in which the fate of two lives was to be decided for right or wrong, for good or ill, and for all time—perhaps, even for more than Time. Vane gripped Ernshaw's hand, and, as the two grips closed, he looked straight into the deep-brown eyes, and said:
"Ernshaw, that will do. By some means you have made me feel to-night just as I did that day when I was talking with her the last time. Yes, you are right. You have shewn me the right way, and, God helping me, I'll take it. I suppose if she doesn't marry me she'll marry Garthorne; but still, I see she mustn't marry me. They are coming down for 'Commem' to-morrow. I shall see her then, and I'll tell her that I have decided that there must be an end of everything except friendship between us. Yes, that is the only way after all—and, now, one other word, old man."