that he would know this side of the grave; the thought came to him bitterly. For an instant he wavered.
"Agatha!" he said with dry lips. "I have already accepted the fellow's challenge."
"And what of that?" she cried. "Would you cling to a barren point of honor in despite of love?"
"Even so," he said, and sighed.
"Oh, Clement," she said, "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear to lose you! I always knew you were in the world somewhere—and now that I have found you it is only to give you up! It is too much!"
Cleggett was silent for a moment. When he spoke it was slowly and gently, but earnestly.
"No point of honor is a barren one, dear," he said. "What the man lying there may be matters nothing. It is not to him that I have given my word, but to myself. In our hurried modern life we are not punctilious enough about these things. Perhaps, in the old days, the men and women were worse than we in many ways. But they held to a few traditions, or the best of them did, that make the loose and tawdry manners of this age seem cheap indeed. All my life I have known that there
