In strange contrast to the scene, in one of the houses some one was singing in a clear tenor voice, which sounded as sweet and pure as if it had been in a choir. For a moment the murmur of voices and tramp of feet ceased, as people paused to listen.
Stephen walked slowly down the street. A woman in one of the darker doorways called out to him. He stopped, bit his lip hard.
“Why not? What is the use, now?” he thought.
He ran up the steps and opened the door. Inside, half a dozen painted women were drinking with the men there. The proprietress beckoned to him to enter.
Then like a veil, before his eyes dropped a cloud of memory. He saw the shed at the hoist, two bodies laid limply on the ground; figures moving in dim lantern light.
He staggered out into the street, drew a deep breath and strode back across the bridge.
“I am through with this sort of thing for good,” he muttered. “I owe the world too big a debt of reparation now. But I will pay it.”
For the first time in his life, Loring’s smile was a smile of power, that power which rises sometimes from a supreme sorrow, sometimes from supreme holiness, sometimes, as now, springing from the black soil of crime; but bespeaking the discipline which has learned to control passion, to bring desire to heel, and to make a man master of himself despite all the devils that this world or the next can send against him.
He had learned his lesson at last, learned it at the cost of two lost lives, and the cost to himself of an overshadowing remorse which he could never escape, let the future hold what it would. But he had learned it.