"And isn't your happiness here?" she demanded, imperiously; "isn't this happiness—the thing you dreamed of?"
She saw his hands clench themselves.
"Yes—but a dream that can't be fulfilled—a secret corner of fancy—that isn't enough. In the end—if one lived on it, set it before one as the end-all—one would sicken and starve. The dream itself would die. I've figured it out—happiness is the consciousness of purpose——"
"What purpose can any one of us have?" she retorted scornfully, "we who are ourselves purposeless creations?"
He waited a moment. When he answered, his voice sounded clear and steady, though his words were faltering, groping efforts of expression.
"I don't know—I mean rather that I can't explain. I'm an inarticulate sort of fellow. It seems to me—ninety-nine days out of a hundred we don't worry as to where we're going or why. We do what we've got to do blindly. But the hundredth day is a day of reckoning. You were going to say just now that I might die if I went out there. Well, that doesn't seem to me so important. Death is the only visible goal we have. What matters, what is vital, what is happiness is that we should reach that goal splendidly—as splendidly as we can. Surely happiness is this, that in our moments of reckoning, when we have to face ourselves, or when we reach the goal, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly, we can look back on our course with the knowledge that, whether punishment or reward or nothing awaits us, we ran straight according to our lights."
"And 'running straight' for you means plunging into the sickness and suffering of others?" she asked moodily.
She saw him throw back his tired shoulders.
"What other 'running straight' is there that matters?" he returned, ardently. "Those poor folk out in Bjura—I'm the only hope they've got. Supposing I fail them? No one would blame me—-no one would say I hadn't run straight—but I should have broken the only law I recognize—I should have denied the only god I know. And more than that—I'm English. When I go out there, I carry my colours with me. It depends on me whether those colours signify to these people suffering or happiness, and whether, in the end, they signify happiness or suffering to us——" He paused, and then went on quietly. "And they must be held higher and steadier because others have forgotten."
"As Colonel Boucicault has forgotten," she put in.