CHAPTER XVIII
THE ESCAPE
THERE was no other way. Through the long blackness of that night, while the guards' steps, on their rounds, rang along the steel platforms, and the faint, low, indefinable medley of sounds from the sleeping prison seemed to whisper and murmur in stealth together, Varge lay upon his cot fighting out this new problem that had come to him. As a mathematician evolves some strange and abstruse calculation, checking and rechecking his steps to verify his solution and finding ever the same result, so to Varge, over and over again came inevitably the same conclusion. There was no other way—he must escape.
To stay there, to see her day by day, to touch her perhaps, to hear her voice, to have the awful, ironic hopelessness of it all thrust upon him with each look into that dear face that stirred his soul to the depths in an agony of yearning, was beyond his strength to bear. To be with her so and never to speak, to smother beneath a calm exterior a passion that rocked and swayed and dominated every faculty, every thought that was in him, was the path that led irrevocably to the day of madness, which, sooner than have come, he might better take his own life. She must never know—this hurt, to shock and frighten her, that would live in her life and bring sorrow to the tender, sensitive heart so full of human sympathy and love for others, must never
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