‘Yes,’ she said.  ‘I should like to know why.’

’It’s a pretty good sign for a lady’s soul when a lot of poor creatures bless her every minute of their lives for fishing them out of the mud and landing them in a decent life.  Come, isn’t it now?  You know it is.  That’s all.  No further argument’s necessary.  The jury is satisfied and the verdict is that you needn’t fuss.  So that’s that, and let’s talk about something else.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Lady Maud answered.  ’Is it right to bribe people to do right?  Sometimes it has seemed very like that!’

‘I don’t set up to be an expert in morality,’ retorted Van Torp, ’but if money, properly used, can prevent murder, I guess that’s better than letting the murder be committed.  You must allow that.  The same way with other crimes, isn’t it?  And so on, down to mere misdemeanours, till you come to ordinary morality.  Now what have you got to say?  If it isn’t much better for the people themselves to lead decent lives just for money’s sake, it’s certainly much better for everybody else that they should.  That appears to me to be unanswerable.  You didn’t start in with the idea of making those poor things just like you, I suppose.  You can’t train a cart-horse to win the Derby.  Yet all their nonsense about equality rests on the theory that you can.  You can’t make a good judge out of a criminal, no matter how the criminal repents of his crimes.  He’s not been born the intellectual equal of the man who’s born to judge him.  His mind is biassed.  Perhaps he’s a degenerate—­everything one isn’t oneself is called degenerate nowadays.  It helps things, I suppose.  And you can’t expect to collect a lot of poor wretches together and manufacture first-class Magdalens out of ninety-nine per cent of them, because you’re the one that needs no repentance, can you?  I forget whether the Bible says it was ninety-nine who did or ninety-nine who didn’t, but you’ll understand my drift, I daresay.  It’s logic, if it isn’t Scripture.  All right.  As long as you can stop the evil, without doing wrong yourself, you’re bringing about a good result.  So don’t fuss.  See?’

‘Yes, I see!’ Lady Maud smiled.  ‘But it’s your money that does it!’

‘That’s nothing,’ Van Torp said, as if he disliked the subject.

He changed it effectually by speaking of his own present intentions and explaining to his friend what he meant to do.

His point of view seemed to be that Bamberger was quite mad since his daughter’s death, and had built up a sensational but clumsy case, with the help of the man Feist, whose evidence, as a confirmed dipsomaniac, would be all but worthless.  It was possible, Van Torp said, that Miss Bamberger had been killed; in fact, Griggs’ evidence alone would almost prove it.  But the chances were a thousand to one that she had been killed by a maniac.  Such murders were not so uncommon as Lady Maud might think.  The police in all countries know how many cases occur which can be explained only on that theory, and how diabolically ingenious madmen are in covering their tracks.