them quite little cots, others big enough for almost full-grown bouncing lasses; they stood with hushed breath before his portrait in the refectory hall or his bust on the stairs; and perhaps they patted the cheeks of some pretty inmate and asked if, when saying her prayers, she always included the name of the patron saint.  On high occasions clergymen and bishops came, there to hiccough and weep over his blessed memory.  Great lords and ladies praised him, newspaper writers praised him, ignorant fools in cottages praised him; and to high and low the crowning grace of his glorious charity was the selection of the softer, gentler, and too often downtrodden sex as the object of such tender care.  That was what set the sentimental rivers flowing.  It proved the innate gentleness and sweetness of him who was now an angel in Heaven.  When it came to choosing the guests for the lovely home he had built in his mind, he had said:  “I will not fill it with a lot of hulking boys.  Boys are naturally rough and coarse animals, and can generally fight their way out on top, no matter how stiff the struggle.  Give me so many graceful delicate girls; pretty helpless things, dainty little innocent fascinating creatures; not necessarily fatherless girls, but unprotected girls—­girls that grievously need protection.”

And Dale thought how the man, when he was alive, dealt with any innocent unprotected girl who chanced to fall into his power.  In imagination he saw him taking care of Mavis, when she was young and tender, and scarcely knew right from wrong.  In imagination he saw it all again—­the pattings and pawings, the scheming and devising, the luring and ensnaring—­Barradine and Mavis—­the man of many years and the girl of few years, the serpent and the dove, the destroyer and the destroyed.  Those torturing mental pictures glowed and took form, and were as vivid now as when, in the hour of his grief and despair, he first made them and saw them.

This departed saint, whose memory had become as a fragrance of myrrh, whose name sounded like the clinking of an incense-pot swung by devout hands, whose monument stood firm as a temple built upon the rock, was simply a dirty old beast for whom no excuse could be possible.  What worse crime can there be than that of befouling youth?  Who is a worse enemy to the commonweal than he who snatches and steals for his transient gratification treasures that are accumulating to make some honest man’s life-long joy?  Such wanton abuse of society’s law and nature’s plan is the unpardonable sin; it is sin as monstrous as the enormities that brought down fire upon the dwellers in the cities of the plain.

To Dale the idea of an offense so gross that its perpetrator deserved neither pity nor mercy was if anything stronger now than when it had first entered and filled his mind.

Yet it seemed to him that now, after all the years that had gone by, he could for the first time perfectly understand the dark and shameful tangle of emotions through which the sinner moved onward to his sin.  It seemed that with luminous clearness he could look right into the corrupt heart of the dead man.  He could understand all, though he could forgive nothing.  He could measure the force of every thought and sensation that had pushed the dead man on and on.