"If you will talk such madness, I can't help it," she said, with
shortened breath.
"Yes--you'll come!" he said, nodding. "What have you to do with Ashe,
Kitty, any longer? You and he are already divided. You have tried life
together and what have you made of it? You're not fit for this mincing,
tripping London life--nor am I? And as for morals--- I'll tell you a
strange thing, Kitty." He bent forward and grasped her hands with a
force which hurt--from which she could not release herself. "I
believe--yes, by God, I believe!--that I am a better man than I was
before I started on this adventure. It's been like drinking at last at
the very source of life--living, not talking about it. One bitter night
last February, for instance, I helped a man--one of the insurgents--who
had taken to the mountains with his wife and children--to carry his
wife, a dying woman, over a mountain-pass to the only place where she
could possibly get help and shelter. We carried her on a litter, six men
taking turns. The cold and the fatigue were such that I shudder now when
I think of it. Yet at the end I seemed to myself a man reborn. I was
happier than I had ever been in my life.
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