"You'll see presently. But don't be alarmed. It's going to be all right. As long as I hold the life you gave me," he continued to explain, "I must do your bidding. I'm not a free man; I'm--don't be offended--I'm your creature. I don't say I was a free man before this came up. I haven't been a free man ever since I've been Herbert Strange. I've been the slave of a sort of make-believe. I've made believe, and I've felt I was justified. Perhaps I was. I'm not quite sure. But I haven't liked it; and now I begin to feel that I can't stand it any longer. You follow me, don't you?"
She nodded, still leaning toward him across the table, and not taking her eyes from his. He remembered afterward though he paid no heed to it at the time, how those eyes grew wide with awe and flashed with strange, lambent brightness.
"I told you a few days ago," he pursued, "that there were _times_ when it was hell. That was putting it mildly--too mildly. There's been no time when it wasn't hell--in here." He tapped his forehead. "I've struggled, and fought, and pushed, and swaggered, and bluffed, and had ups and downs, and taken heart, and swaggered and bluffed again, and lied all through--and I've made Herbert Strange a respectable man of business on the high road to success. But when I come near you it all goes to pieces--like one of those curiously conserved dead bodies when they're brought to the air. There's nothing to them. There's nothing to me--so long as I'm Herbert Strange."
"But you _are_ Herbert Strange. You can't help yourself--now."
"Herbert Strange goes back into the nothingness out of which he was born the minute I become Norrie Ford again."
She drew herself up hastily, with a gasp.
"It's exactly what I mean to do." He spoke very slowly "I'm going to be a free man, and my own master, even if it leads me where--where they meant to put me when you snatched me away. I'm going back to my fellow-men, to the body corporate--"
She rose in agitation, and drew back from him toward the chimney-piece. "So that if--if anything happens," she said, "I shall have driven you to it. That's how you get your revenge."
"Not at all. I'm not coming to this decision suddenly, or in a spirit of revenge, in any way." He followed her, standing near her, on the hearth-rug. "I can truthfully say," he went on in his slow, explanatory fashion, "that there's been no time, since the minute I made my first dash for liberty, when I haven't known, in the bottom of my heart, what a good thing it would have been if I hadn't done it. I've come to see--I've _had_ to--- that the death-chair would have been better, with self-respect, than freedom to go and come, with the necessity to gag every one, every minute of the day, and every day in the year, and all the time, with lies. If that seems far-fetched to you--"