Cyril at once rushes to the court, which he had only left for an hour, just in time to hear the verdict, “Manslaughter.”

“Stop!” he cries.  “I have evidence—­the prisoner is innocent!”

The judge, not understanding what he says, orders his removal; his friends, thinking him distracted, persuade him to be quiet while the utmost sentence—­twenty years—­is given.  On hearing this, Cyril, with a loud cry, falls senseless.  He remains in delirium many weeks.  A pathetic farewell between Henry and Lilian, who is the only believer in his innocence, and who renews her promise to him, closes the first part.

The tragedy, faintly foreshadowed from the first line, and gradually developed from Cyril’s self-righteousness and irrepressible joy in Alma’s unguarded betrayal of unconscious passion, has darkened the whole story.  Sin has engendered sin.  Cyril’s noble purpose to devote himself entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless ambition.

His self-respect, spiritual pride and egoism; his ready tact, social charm, and power of psychological analysis, subtle sophistry and self-deception; his warmest affection, disguised self-love; his finest qualities perverted lead to his lowest fall.

His weak and belated attempt to right Alma’s wrong has killed her father.  Alma’s desecrated love has turned to fierce idolatry, laying waste Lilian’s happiness, and working Henry’s complete ruin.  Cyril’s cowardice has delayed clearing his friend till it is too late to save him.

    Not poppy, not mandragora,
    Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world

will ever medicine again to him that sweet sleep he had before his guilt.

III.—­The Darkness of a Prison

A summer Sunday two years later.  Alma and her child in a cornfield, listening to bells ringing for Cyril’s homecoming with his bride.  All the softness and youth gone from Alma’s tragic face, and the last gleams of penitence from her heart, since her perjury.  Jealousy is prompting her to go and tell Marion all.  But Judkins comes and interrupts these wild thoughts.  He offers marriage, rehabilitation, and a home in America.  She hesitates.  She is shunned by all, and can get no work in Malbourne, but has not been destitute; money has found its way mysteriously to her cottage.  So for the child’s sake she accepts.

Tea on the rectory lawn.  Lilian is thinking of the prisoner, Lennie wondering aloud, “How does Alma like having to go to hell for lying about Henry?” Cyril is terribly agitated at this.  He has scarcely yet recovered from his long mental illness after Henry’s sentence.  Marion is not happy—­she may never allude to Henry.  The slightest reference to him makes Cyril ill.  Later, in the moonlight, Ingram Swaynestone asks Lilian, whom he has always loved, to marry him.  He cannot believe that she is secretly engaged to Henry.  She points towards Henry’s prison.  “I am all that man has on earth, and I love him!” she says.