“Michael,” said Arthur Inglewood in a low voice, “you must keep quiet.”

“Mr. Moon,” said Pym with exquisite good temper, “probably regards the institution in a more antiquated manner.  Probably he would make it stringent and uniform.  He would treat divorce in some great soul of steel—­the divorce of a Julius Caesar or of a Salt Ring Robinson—­ exactly as he would treat some no-account tramp or labourer who scoots from his wife.  Science has views broader and more humane.  Just as murder for the scientist is a thirst for absolute destruction, just as theft for the scientist is a hunger for monotonous acquisition, so polygamy for the scientist is an extreme development of the instinct for variety.  A man thus afflicted is incapable of constancy.  Doubtless there is a physical cause for this flitting from flower to flower—­ as there is, doubtless, for the intermittent groaning which appears to afflict Mr. Moon at the present moment.  Our own world-scorning Winterbottom has even dared to say, `For a certain rare and fine physical type polygamy is but the realization of the variety of females, as comradeship is the realization of the variety of males.’  In any case, the type that tends to variety is recognized by all authoritative inquirers.  Such a type, if the widower of a negress, does in many ascertained cases espouse en seconde noces an albino; such a type, when freed from the gigantic embraces of a female Patagonian, will often evolve from its own imaginative instinct the consoling figure of an Eskimo.  To such a type there can be no doubt that the prisoner belongs.  If blind doom and unbearable temptation constitute any slight excuse for a man, there is no doubt that he has these excuses.

“Earlier in the inquiry the defence showed real chivalric ideality in admitting half of our story without further dispute.  We should like to acknowledge and imitate so eminently large-hearted a style by conceding also that the story told by Curate Percy about the canoe, the weir, and the young wife seems to be substantially true.  Apparently Smith did marry a young woman he had nearly run down in a boat; it only remains to be considered whether it would not have been kinder of him to have murdered her instead of marrying her.  In confirmation of this fact I can now con-cede to the defence an unquestionable record of such a marriage.”

So saying, he handed across to Michael a cutting from the “Maidenhead Gazette” which distinctly recorded the marriage of the daughter of a “coach,” a tutor well known in the place, to Mr. Innocent Smith, late of Brakespeare College, Cambridge.

When Dr. Pym resumed it was realized that his face had grown at once both tragic and triumphant.