He slipped it hurriedly in his pocket, and set off at a wild pace. And suddenly his conscience, his accusing conscience, rose up. He saw where he had been going. It brought him a solemn moment. Then he remembered the girl. He took the letter from his pocket and held it clutched like a hand in his hand.
"Good God," he said, "I wonder what'll become of her?"
He had found so much good that the tragedy revolted him. So he went through the busy streets with their flare and ceaseless motion, in the wet of the night, watching with solemn, melancholy eyes, other women pass with sidelong glances. All the horror and the hopelessness of a life he could not better thronged over him, and he stood a long while looking down the great bleak ways, through the gates that it is better not to pry ajar.
Then in a revulsion of feeling, terrified at what he divined, he left and went, almost in an instinct for protection, hurriedly to the Story home, white and peaceful under the elms. He did not go in, but he stood a little while opposite, looking in through the warm windows at the serenity and the security that seemed to permeate the place.
When he returned to his rooms, Joe and Regan were there. He sat down directly and told them the whole story, showing them her letter.
"She went away—for my sake," he said. "I know it. Poor little devil. It's a letter I'll always keep." Solemnly, looking at the letter, he resolved to put this with the one, the first from Jean Story, and reverently he felt that the two had the right to be joined.
"What's terrible about it," he said, talking out his soul, "is that there's so much good in them. And yet what can you do? They're human, they respond, you can't help pitying them—wanting to be decent, to help—and you can't. It's terrible to think that there are certain doors in life you open and close, that you must turn your back on human lives sometimes, that things can't be changed. Lord, but it's a terrible thing to realize."
He stopped, and he heard Regan's voice, moved as he had never heard it, say:
"That's my story—only I married."