It was not until March that Rufus realised that his dream was at an end. He had hoped against hope for weeks; had toiled on with steady persistency and tried to banish from his brain the thought of failure. The knowledge came suddenly, though he took a long journey to the North of England to seek it. When he turned his face toward home he knew that all his labour had been in vain.

Not that the invention on which he had bestowed so much toil and thought was worthless. On the contrary, he saw greater possibilities in it than ever before. But he had been forestalled. Another brain, as inventive as his own, and with far greater facilities for reducing theories to practice, had conceived the same idea and carried it into effect, while he was still painfully toiling in the same direction. When he looked at the work brought out by his competitor in the North, he felt as though there was no further place for him on earth.

"It is better than mine," he said to himself, sadly. "The main idea is the same, but he has shown more skill in developing it."

It was the advantage of the trained engineer over the untrained, of experience over inexperience. He had no feeling of bitterness in his heart against the man who had succeeded; he was of too generous a nature to be envious. The man who had won deserved to win.

He journeyed home like a man in a dream. The way seemed neither long nor short. The first faint odour of spring was in the air, but he did not heed it. His fellow passengers seemed more like shadows than real people. The world for him was at an end. He had no more to do. One question only was left to trouble him. How to put out life's brief candle without awakening any suspicion of foul play. He was more heavily stunned than he knew. Outwardly he was quite calm and collected, but it was the calmness of insensibility. For the moment he was past feeling; it was as though some powerful narcotic had been injected into his veins. He had an idea that nothing could ruffle him any more.

He had fretted a good deal at first over the loss of his good name. It seemed a monstrous thing that any man should have the power to rob him of what he valued more than all else on earth. That Gervase Tregony had deliberately bribed Tim Polgarrow and his own gardener to say he was drunk he had not the least shadow of a doubt, but he had no proof; and to accuse a man of inciting to perjury—especially a man in the position of Gervase Tregony—was a very dangerous thing. So he had to keep his mouth shut, and bear in silence one of the cruellest wrongs ever inflicted upon a man.

He was not at all sorry that he had disfigured the not too handsome face of Gervase Tregony for a few days. Indeed, he was human enough to feel that he would not mind paying another five pounds to be allowed to repeat the process. It was not "the assault" part of the affair that troubled him, nobody thought much the worse of him for that side of the episode. Gervase was not so popular in St. Gaved that he had many sympathisers.

But to be accused of drunkenness, and to have the accusation sworn to, and set down as proved, was as the bitterness of death to him. If there was any vice in the world he loathed it was drunkenness. It seemed to him the parent of so many other vices as well as the Hades of human degradation. It is true he was not a pledged abstainer. He never cared to pledge himself to anything, but in practice he was above reproach.

He knew, of course, why the charge of drunkenness had been tacked on to that of assault, without the former the latter would not hold water. It would be too humiliating to Gervase to admit that a sober man had beaten him in fair fight; hence the fiction that he was pounced upon suddenly and unawares by a man who was mad drunk. But the chief reason lay deeper still. He was not so blind that he could not see that Gervase was jealous of him, and sometimes he half wondered, half hoped, that he had reason to be jealous. It made his nerves tingle when he thought, that in the big house and before the Tregony family, Madeline Grover might have unwittingly let fall some word that could be construed into a partiality for him. It was a thought that would not bear to be looked at or analysed he knew. Nevertheless, it would flash across his brain, and that pretty frequently.

Hence, from Gervase's point of view the charge of drunkenness was what the man in the street would call "good business." He often pictured Gervase gloating over his triumph. If ever Madeline thought affectionately of him she would do so no longer. She would try to forget that he ever crossed her path, and, perhaps be sorry to the end of her days that she had shown him so much favour.

This was the bitterest part of the whole experience. That Madeline should think ill of him—the one woman that all unwittingly he had learned to love—was more painful than all the rest put together. It was bad enough to be held up as an awful example in Church and Sunday-school and Temperance meeting, as he heard was the case. But all that he did not mind so much. He might live it down in time. But if Madeline was once within his reach, and this cruel slander drove her into the arms of Gervase Tregony, that would be a tragedy that could never be lived down, that would darken his life to the end of the chapter.

For several weeks he kept hoping that he would meet Madeline again. He wanted to have one more conversation with her. He hoped that her generous nature would allow him to put his side of the case; or, if that was denied him that he might be allowed to say with all the emphasis he could command, that the accusation was false. But she gave him no such opportunity. He watched for her in the streets of St. Gaved. He took long walks across the downs, he loitered in the road that led past the lodge gates, but never once did she show her face. She evidently meant to let him see that their acquaintanceship was at an end.

Then came the news that the whole family had gone abroad, and that no one knew when they would return to Trewinion Hall again. He heard the news with a dull sense of pain at his heart. The brightest—the most beautiful thing—that had ever come into his life had gone out again, and he was left like a man stricken blind in a land of sunshine.

Yet, strangely enough, his sense of grief and shame and loss increased his desire for life. He did not want to hide himself—to pass out into silence and forgetfulness. He wanted to live so that he might redeem his life from the shadow that had fallen upon it, and prove to Madeline Grover, however late in the day, how cruelly he had been wronged.

On his return from the North, however, this and every other feeling was swallowed up in a strange insensibility to pain, both mental and physical. The one thought that dominated him was that he must keep his pledge to Felix Muller. As an honourable man he was bound to do that, and perhaps the sooner he did it the better.

He had spent three-fourths of the money he had borrowed. He had a few assets in the shape of tools, the rest would have to be scrapped, and would only be worth the value of old iron. In case there were no mishaps over the insurance money, Felix Muller would be well repaid for the risks he had taken and the world would go on just as if nothing had happened.

After a good deal of cogitation he came to the conclusion that the easiest way out of life would be by drowning. He was not a very good swimmer. He soon got exhausted and so was careful never to venture out of his depth. It would be quite easy, therefore, for him to swim out into deep water or take a header from a rock when the tide was up and then quietly drown.

That would mean that he would have to wait until summer. Nobody in St. Gaved bathed in the sea in March. To avoid any suspicion of foul play he would have to follow his normal habits and preserve as far as possible a cheerful temper.

It was soon whispered through the town that Rufus's great invention had proved a failure. Some sympathised with him. Some secretly rejoiced. For, curiously enough, no man can live in this world and do his duty without making enemies. There are narrow, ungenerous souls in every community who regard the success of their neighbours as a personal affront, who can see no merit in anyone, and who are never able to shape their lips to a word of praise or congratulation.

These people always complained that Rufus was a cut above his station. They said it would do him good "to be taken down a peg." But they were dreadfully sorry for the people whom he had induced to invest money in his wild-cat enterprise.

There were talks of his being made a bankrupt, and hints were thrown out that he might soon have to appear in a court of law on a worse charge than that of being drunk and disorderly. Moralists were able to see in his case striking illustrations of the truth that "the way of transgressors is hard." It was against the eternal order that a man should permanently prosper who had turned his back upon the faith of his fathers. His failure was heaven's punishment on him for neglecting church and chapel, and his fall into the sin of drunkenness was to be traced to precisely the same source.

Some of these things were repeated to Rufus by not too judicious friends, but they little guessed how deeply they hurt him. It was not his habit to betray his feelings. When he was most deeply stung he said the least.

A few days after his return Felix Muller drove over to see him. He came as usual after dark, and his excuse was that he had been to see clients in the neighbourhood.

Felix was full of sympathy and generous in his language of commiseration.

"We must still hope for the best," he said, after a long pause, looking into the fire with a grave and abstracted air. "You have several months yet to turn round in."

"It will be impossible for me to find the money except in the way we agreed upon," Rufus answered, without emotion.

"It may look so now," Muller answered, with pretended cheerfulness; "but in this topsy-turvy world there is no knowing what will turn up. I wish it were possible for me to allow you an extension of time."

"I fear it would not help me, if you could," Rufus said, absently.

"Well, perhaps it wouldn't, but all the same I should like to give you an extra chance or two if that were possible."

"I am not asking for any favours," Rufus said, indifferently. "I am getting things straight for you with as little delay as possible."

"And I shall loathe myself for being compelled to receive the money when you are gone."

Rufus looked at him for a moment with a doubtful light in his eyes.

"Why, what can it matter to you?" he questioned. "I thought you were a man without sentiment."

"I am in the main. I am just a man of business, and nothing else. Yet there's no denying I am fond of you. You are a man of my own way of thinking. May I not say you are a disciple of mine?"

"You may say what you like," Sterne replied, with a hollow laugh. "I believe you helped to destroy some of the illusions of my youth."

"And therefore you are grateful to me, and I am interested in you."

"I am not sure that I am particularly grateful," Rufus said, wearily, "What is there to be grateful for?"

"What is there to be grateful for?" Muller questioned, raising his eyebrows. "Surely it is something to have got out of the fogs of superstition into the clear light of reason. To have escaped from the bondage of creeds into the freedom of humanity. To have discovered the true value and proportion of things, to have been delivered from all fear of the future——"

"Are we not playing with words and phrases?" Rufus questioned, suddenly.

"My dear friend, what do you mean?" Muller asked in surprise.

"Suppose by reason and logic we can destroy everything until nothing is left? Is there any satisfaction in that? Is there any comfort in a philosophy of negations?"

"Explain yourself."

"Well, we will say for the sake of argument that we have proved there is no God and no future state. That all religions are myths and dreams. That matter explains everything, that thought is only sensation, that morality simply registers a stage in evolution, that death breaks up the elements which compose the individual, and they return to their native state. What then? Have we got any further? Are we not merely playing with words and phrases as children play with pebbles on the shore?"

"My dear fellow, whom have you been talking with lately?"

"That is nothing to the point," Rufus answered, with a touch of defiance in his voice. "What I want to know is, how or in what way we are better off than say the vicar and his curate?"

"My dear fellow, surely you can see that they are the puppets of an exploded superstition."

"Well, suppose they are. What are we the puppets of?"

"We are not puppets at all. We are free men."

"Words again," Rufus answered, with a pathetic smile. "We are as completely hemmed in by the forces that surround us as they are. As completely baffled by the riddle of existence. In what does our freedom consist? We have cast off one dogma to pin our faith to another."

"No, no; we are not dogmatists at all."

"Words again, Muller. You have your set of beliefs as clearly defined as the vicar has his. You have formulated your creed. That it is largely a denial of all he believes is nothing to the point. A negative implies a positive."

"Ah, but he believes in what affects the freedom of the human mind and the human will. He believes in a personal God, in human accountability to that Being; in a Day of Judgment; in a future state of rewards and punishments."

"And you believe in extinction?"

"Of course I do, and so do you."

"But is there any such thing as extinction? Can you destroy anything? If a thing ceases to exist in one form, does it not exist in another?"

"Of course, that is the eternal process, the undeviating order. At death you disintegrate and turn to dust. In other words you are resolved into your native elements, those elements are used up again in other forms, they feed a rose, give colour to the grass, pass into the plumage of a bird, or into the structure of an animal."

"But I am more than dust, Muller, and so are you. Your philosophy still leaves the riddle unsolved. I am coming round to the conviction that personality is not to be explained away by any such rough-and-ready method."

"I am sorry to hear you say so."

"Why should you be sorry?"

"Because when a man is in the grip of superstition there is no knowing what he will do or leave undone. So-called religion is made an excuse for so many things."

"For not committing suicide, for instance?"

"Exactly. If a man gets the stupid notion into his head that he is accountable to somebody for his life, or that he will have to give an account at some hypothetical judgment day, that man becomes a slave at once. He is no longer his own master. No longer free to do what he likes."

"My dear Muller," Rufus questioned, with a smile. "Are you free to do as you like? Is not the life of every one of us bounded by laws and conditions that we cannot escape?"

"Up to a point, no doubt. Freedom is not chaos. Liberty moves within legitimate bounds. Our philosophy is at any rate rational."

"Then you believe in a moral order as well as a physical?"

"The moral order man has evolved for himself. It is a concomitant of civilisation."

"Why not say he has evolved the physical order for himself? Would it not be just as reasonable? He may have evolved considerable portions of his creeds and any number of dogmas. But the moral order is no more a part of ecclesiasticism than earthquakes are. It is part of the universal cosmos before which we stand helpless and bewildered."

"My dear Sterne, you talk like a parson. Who has been coaching you?"

"No, no, Muller; the subject is too big and complex to be dismissed with a sneer."

"I expect I shall hear of you next playing the martyr for moral ideals," Muller said, with a slight curl of the lip.

"That seems to be the next item on the programme," Rufus answered, quietly; "for, after all, what is honesty—the just payment of debts—but a moral ideal."

"It belongs to that code of honour certainly that civilised peoples have shaped for themselves."

"Then you think I am bound to my pledge by nothing more weighty than that?"

"What could be more weighty? You could not escape from it without—without—but why discuss the impossible? You are a man of honour, that is enough."

"And when is the latest you would like the money, Muller?"

"It will need a month or two to clear up things," he said, evasively.

"And if I am too precipitate I might be suspected?"

"Exactly. You cannot be too wary. Companies have grown suspicious. There have been so many attempts of late to cheat them, and, of course, in the eye of the law robbing a company stands in precisely the same category as robbing an individual."

Rufus gave a start, and all the blood left his cheeks, and for several moments he stared at the fire in silence.

Muller rose from his chair, and began to brush his bowler hat with his hand.

"I'm frightfully sorry it's happened," he said, consolingly, "but, after all, it will soon be over."

"Ye—s."

"I advised you against it. I did not like the risk from the first."

"But you'll profit by the transaction?"

"My dear fellow, we're bound to make a little profit now and then or we should starve."

"Profit?" Rufus mused, as if to himself, "what shall it profit a man——"

"Perhaps you will advise me nearer the time?" Muller said, uneasily, and he moved towards the door.

"No. The papers will advise you."

"Well, good-night. I will not say good-bye; perhaps something may turn up yet." And he pulled open the door and passed out into the hall.

"Good-night," Rufus answered, and he turned back to his easy-chair and sat down.