She was alive; she was faithful. Boswell was making her comfortable with Farwell's money. She was accepting less and less because she was winning her way to independence in an honourable line. Since no man had entered her life after Farwell's death was reported, Farwell could readily see why.
Over and over, that first night in the woods, Farwell rehearsed these facts for comfort's sake. Suppose he made an escape. Suppose he lost himself in the city's labyrinth—what then?
And then, just at daybreak, a vivid and sharp memory of the woman's face came to him as he had last seen it pressed against the bars of his cell. Behind the squares of metal it shone like an angel's. Fair, pitiful, wonder-filled eyes, and quivering mouth. All day the picture haunted him and seemed to draw him toward it. He walked twenty miles that day and came at sunset to a dense jungle where he made his camp and stretched himself exhaustedly before the fire.
Sleep did not come easily to him; he was too excited and nerve worn. The white face checked by iron bars would not fade, and in the red glow of the flames it began to look wan and haggard, as if the day had tired it and it could find no rest or comfort.
The feeling of suffocation Ledyard had managed to create, returned to him. He grew nervous, ill at ease, and fearful.
Then he fell to moralizing. He was not often given to that, or introspection. Longing and alternate hope and despair had been his comrades and bedfellows, but he rarely indulged in calm consideration. Smoking his pipe, stretched wearily on the moss, he wondered if men knew how much they punished while fulfilling their ideals of justice?
"If only the sense of vindictiveness could be left out," he thought; "the Lord knows they have it all in their power once the key is turned on us. I deserved all they meant to inflict, but no human being deserves all that was given unconsciously."
Then Farwell relived his life, while the wood crumbled to ashes and the moon came up over the hills. A misguided, misspent boyhood; too much money; too little common sense; then the fling in the open with every emotion and desire uncurbed. Well, he had to learn his lesson and God knew he had; but why, in the working of things, shouldn't one be given a chance to prove the well-learned task; an opportunity, while among the living, to settle the question?
However, such fancies were idle, and Farwell shook the ashes from his pipe and gave a humorous shrug.
It would be a fine piece of work to slip from the clutches of the past and make good! This idea caused him to tremble. Surely no one would look for him in the camp of the upright. Walking the paths of the clean and sane he would be more surely secure from detection than anywhere else on earth. That was what his past had done for him. The truth of this sank into the lonely man's soul with sickening finality. And as he realized it, and compared it with the fact of his youth, he groaned. What an infernal fool he had been! What fools all such fellows were who, like him, wasted everything in their determination to make the unreal, real. He did not now desire to be a drivelling repentant; he wanted, God knew he really wanted, a chance to be decent and live; but in order to live he must go on acting a part and cringing and hiding.