crime” left him no peace.  Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him.  He had suffered all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he, more than other men, was called to be his brother’s keeper.  It was natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on Westall’s rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes’s young eyes and limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord’s place and responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.

But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life and action, and its relation to public order.  That the gamekeepers destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself.  If the circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to be a murderer, no employer’s interest, no landlord’s desire for vengeance, would have stood in his way.  On the other hand, believing, as he emphatically did, that Hurd’s slaying of Westall had been of a kind more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere with a duty to justice and society.

Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and compunctions.

Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of trouble of mind; more “in character,” so to speak, than at this moment.  Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal humility, and interfused with all—­determining all—­elements of judgment, subtleties, prejudices, modes of looking at things, for which he was hardly responsible, so deeply ingrained were they by inheritance and custom.  More than this:  did not the ultimate explanation of the whole attitude of the man lie in the slow but irresistible revolt of a strong individuality against the passion which had for a time suppressed it?  The truth of certain moral relations may be for a time obscured and distorted; none the less, reality wins the day.  So Hallin read it.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, during days when both for Aldous and Wharton the claims of a bustling, shouting public, which must be canvassed, shaken hands with, and spoken to, and the constant alternations of business meetings, committee-rooms and the rest, made it impossible, after all, for either man to spend more than the odds and ends of thought upon anything outside the clatter of politics, Marcella had been living a life of intense and monotonous feeling, shut up almost within the walls of a tiny cottage, hanging over sick-beds, and thrilling to each pulse of anguish as it beat in the miserable beings she tended.