When Hafiz went off with a rush of spirits, Gordon, being left alone, sank to a still deeper depression than before. He felt as if he were thrown back again on that desolate shore where the tides of his mind ebbed and flowed under the blank darkness of a starless sky.
The proud atonement whereby he had expected to wipe out his crime had fallen utterly to ashes. It looked like nothing better now than a selfish impulse to escape from a life that had become a burden to him by killing his father's honour, his mother's trust, and the last hope of Helena's happiness.
"No, I cannot deliver myself up. It is impossible," he thought.
But if death itself was denied to him, what was there left to him in life? His career as a soldier was clearly at an end, his father's house was for ever closed to him, and his days with Helena were over.
"Then what can I do? Where can I go?" he asked himself.
Suddenly he remembered what the General had said in that delirious moment when with bitter taunts he had told him to fly to some foreign country where men would know nothing of his disgrace. Cruel and unjust as that sentence had seemed to him then, it appeared to be all that was left to him now, when work and home and love alike were gone from him.
"Yes, I'll go away," he thought, with a choking sob. "I'll bury myself as far from humanity as possible."
Yet at the next moment the hand of iron was on his heart again, and he told himself that though he might fly from the sight of man he could not escape from the eye of God, and to be alone with that was more than a guilty man could bear, and live.
"But why can't I go to America?" he asked himself.
It was his mother's home, and a country to which something in his blood had always been calling him. But no! That refuge also was denied to him, for though he might hide in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, or San Francisco, better than in the trackless desert itself, yet in the very pulse of life he would still be alone, with a mind that must always be rambling through the ways of the past, seeing nothing in the happiness of other men but cruel visions of what might have come to him also but for one blind moment of headstrong passion.