“I will not prejudge anything, that I promise you.  I will keep my mind open to the last.  But—­I should like to say—­it would not be any easier to me to throw myself into an agitation for reprieve because this man was tempted to crime by my property—­on my land.  I should think it right to look at it altogether from the public point of view.  The satisfaction of my own private compunctions—­of my own private feelings—­is not what I ought to regard.  My own share in the circumstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does indeed concern me deeply.  You cannot imagine but that the moral problem of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened.  It troubled me much before.  Now, it has become an oppression—­a torture.  I have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my remembrance of him.  Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old standards.  As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as this—­”

His voice faltered.

“But,” he resumed, speaking steadily again, “I ought to warn you that such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this particular case.  In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital punishment as such.  I do not believe we could rightly give it up.  Your attitude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty.  I, on the other hand, believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would himself claim his own death, as his best chance, his only chance—­in this mysterious universe!—­of self-recovery.  Then it comes to this—­was the act murder?  The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears to me to be substantially just, and guided by it—­”

“You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the world,” she interrupted wildly; “as if law were not made and administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the lawbreaker!”

He looked troubled.

“Ah, but law is something beyond laws or those who administer them,” he said in a lower tone; “and the law—­the obligation-sense—­of our own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to what it is, out of our own best life—­ours, yet not ours—­the best proof we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in ourselves of some diviner power than our own will—­our best clue to what that power may be!”

He spoke at first, looking away—­wrestling out his thought, as it were, by himself—­then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal implied, though not expressed, in what he said—­intense appeal to her for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of difference.  His look both promised and implored.