to be in prison.  What he did is worse than what you did, if you come to that!” Laurence lifted his face.  “Judge not, brother,” he said; “the heart is a dark well.”  Keith’s yellowish face grew red and swollen, as though he were mastering the tickle of a bronchial cough.  “What are you going to do, then?  I suppose I may ask you not to be entirely oblivious of our name; or is such a consideration unworthy of your honour?” Laurence bent his head.  The gesture said more clearly than words:  ‘Don’t kick a man when he’s down!’

“I don’t know what I’m going to do—­nothing at present.  I’m awfully sorry, Keith; awfully sorry.”

Keith looked at him, and without another word went out.

VI

To any, save philosophers, reputation may be threatened almost as much by disgrace to name and family as by the disgrace of self.  Keith’s instinct was always to deal actively with danger.  But this blow, whether it fell on him by discovery or by confession, could not be countered.  As blight falls on a rose from who knows where, the scandalous murk would light on him.  No repulse possible!  Not even a wriggling from under!  Brother of a murderer hung or sent to penal servitude!  His daughter niece to a murderer!  His dead mother-a murderer’s mother!  And to wait day after day, week after week, not knowing whether the blow would fall, was an extraordinarily atrocious penance, the injustice of which, to a man of rectitude, seemed daily the more monstrous.

The remand had produced evidence that the murdered man had been drinking heavily on the night of his death, and further evidence of the accused’s professional vagabondage and destitution; it was shown, too, that for some time the archway in Glove Lane had been his favourite night haunt.  He had been committed for trial in January.  This time, despite misgivings, Keith had attended the police court.  To his great relief Larry was not there.  But the policeman who had come up while he was looking at the archway, and given him afterwards that scare in the girl’s rooms, was chief witness to the way the accused man haunted Glove Lane.  Though Keith held his silk hat high, he still had the uncomfortable feeling that the man had recognised him.

His conscience suffered few, if any, twinges for letting this man rest under the shadow of the murder.  He genuinely believed that there was not evidence enough to convict; nor was it in him to appreciate the tortures of a vagabond shut up.  The scamp deserved what he had got, for robbing a dead body; and in any case such a scarecrow was better off in prison than sleeping out under archways in December.  Sentiment was foreign to Keith’s character, and his justice that of those who subordinate the fates of the weak and shiftless to the needful paramountcy of the strong and well established.

His daughter came back from school for the Christmas holidays.  It was hard to look up from her bright eyes and rosy cheeks and see this shadow hanging above his calm and ordered life, as in a glowing room one’s eye may catch an impending patch of darkness drawn like a spider’s web across a corner of the ceiling.