"Boswell tells you that?"
"Yes. And he will never let her know. Unless I——"
"You expect to go back—some day?"
Farwell gave a dry, mirthless laugh at this, and then replied:
"After I've been dead long enough, when I've been good long enough, perhaps. You know even in a disembodied spirit hope dies hard. Yes—I had hoped to go back."
"I—I thought so." Ledyard leaned forward and across the table; his face was not three feet from Farwell's.
"I like to trace diseases down to the last germ," he said. "You're a disease, Farwell Maxwell, a mighty, ugly, dangerous one. You oughtn't to be alive; you're a menace while you have breath in your body; you should have died years ago in payment of your debt, just as Martin did, but you escaped, and now some one has got to keep an eye on you; see that you don't skip quarantine. You understand?"
Farwell felt the turning of the screw.
"I'm going to be the eye, Maxwell. You're going to stay right where you are until you pass off this sphere. Remembering what you once were, your pastimes and love of luxury, this seems as hellish a place and existence as even you deserve. When I saw you last night"—and here Ledyard laughed—"it was all I could do to control myself. You play your part well; but you always had a knack for theatricals. I know I'm a hard, unforgiving man, but there is just one phase of human nature that I will not stand for, and that is the refusal to take the medicine prescribed for the disease. What incentive have people for better living and upright thinking if every devil of a fellow who gets through his beastiality is permitted to come up into the ranks and march shoulder to shoulder with the best? If it's living you want and will lie for, steal for, and beg for—have it; but have it here where the chances are all against your old self. You'll probably never murder any one here or ruin the women; so grovel on!"
As he listened Farwell seemed to shrink and age. In that hour he recognized the fact that through all the years of self-imposed exile he had held to the hope of release in the future: the going back to that which he had once known. But looking at the hard, set face opposite he knew that this hope was futile: he must live forever where he was, or, by departing, bring about him the bloodhounds of justice and vengeance. Ledyard had but to whistle, he knew, and again the pursuit would be keen, and in the end—a long blank lay beyond that!