"And yet are we responsible? Is not every action of life determined for us by circumstances, disposition, heredity, all forces over which we have no control?"
"And after you admit all that, every faculty of your being tells you you are responsible. After you have conceded every fatalist argument, you know that it is wrong. And more, you know that when you do wrong you are haunted by remorse, because you feel that you could have done right."
"Right! wrong!" said Ricordo, and he laughed in his soft, insinuating way.
"You do not believe in them?"
"Ah, signorina, let us cease to argue. Your faith is a tree which has borne such beautiful flowers and such wondrous fruits that you baffle logic. But then, signorina, you have never lived in hell."
Both Herbert Briarfield and Olive cast quick glances at him, but he did not alter his position; he walked quietly on, his eyes fixed on the ground.
"I say, Signor Ricordo," said Briarfield in an expostulating tone.
"That's why I am afraid of the truth," went on Ricordo, without seeming to notice Briarfield. "When a man has lived in hell for years, it upsets preconceived notions, it scatters logic to the winds, it makes conventional morality appear to be—what it is."
Olive Castlemaine felt that the man had thrown a kind of spell upon her. She did not realise that, to say the least, their conversation was not what was natural between people who had met for the first time. Had any one told her the previous day that on meeting a stranger of whom she knew nothing she would enter into a discussion with him on such topics, she would have laughed at it as impossible, yet she felt nothing of the incongruity of the situation. Somehow Ricordo seemed like a voice out of the past, and for a time she forgot things present.
"You have lived—that is——"