His friends, idling on the lawn, hailed him.  He passed by them quickly without answering, without so much as a glance at them over his shoulder.  Arriving at the rose-garden, he stopped and took out his pipe; then suddenly changed his mind, and turned back again by another path.  There was no certainty, at that hour of the day, of his being left alone in the rose-garden.  He had a fierce and hungry longing to be by himself; he felt as if he could have been the death of any body who came and spoke to him at that moment.  With his head down and his brows knit heavily, he followed the path to see what it ended in.  It ended in a wicket-gate which led into a kitchen-garden.  Here he was well out of the way of interruption:  there was nothing to attract visitors in the kitchen-garden.  He went on to a walnut-tree planted in the middle of the inclosure, with a wooden bench and a broad strip of turf running round it.  After first looking about him, he seated himself and lit his pipe.

“I wish it was done!” he said.

He sat, with his elbows on his knees, smoking and thinking.  Before long the restlessness that had got possession of him forced him to his feet again.  He rose, and paced round and round the strip of greensward under the walnut-tree, like a wild beast in a cage.

What was the meaning of this disturbance in the inner man?  Now that he had committed himself to the betrayal of the friend who had trusted and served him, was he torn by remorse?

He was no more torn by remorse than you are while your eye is passing over this sentence.  He was simply in a raging fever of impatience to see himself safely la nded at the end which he had in view.

Why should he feel remorse?  All remorse springs, more or less directly, from the action of two sentiments, which are neither of them inbred in the natural man.  The first of these sentiments is the product of the respect which we learn to feel for ourselves.  The second is the product of the respect which we learn to feel for others.  In their highest manifestations, these two feelings exalt themselves, until the first he comes the love of God, and the second the love of Man.  I have injured you, and I repent of it when it is done.  Why should I repent of it if I have gained something by it for my own self and if you can’t make me feel it by injuring Me?  I repent of it because there has been a sense put into me which tells me that I have sinned against Myself, and sinned against You.  No such sense as that exists among the instincts of the natural man.  And no such feelings as these troubled Geoffrey Delamayn; for Geoffrey Delamayn was the natural man.

When the idea of his scheme had sprung to life in his mind, the novelty of it had startled him—­the enormous daring of it, suddenly self-revealed, had daunted him.  The signs of emotion which he had betrayed at the writing-table in the library were the signs of mere mental perturbation, and of nothing more.