And yet, what had the young man done?  And in what had the System failed?

The lady could not but ask herself this, while she condoled with the offended father.

“My friend,” she said, tenderly taking his hand before she retired, “I know how deeply you must be grieved.  I know what your disappointment must be.  I do not beg of you to forgive him now.  You cannot doubt his love for this young person, and according to his light, has he not behaved honourably, and as you would have wished, rather than bring her to shame?  You will think of that.  It has been an accident—­a misfortune—­a terrible misfortune"...

“The God of this world is in the machine—­not out of it,” Sir Austin interrupted her, and pressed her hand to get the good-night over.

At any other time her mind would have been arrested to admire the phrase; now it seemed perverse, vain, false, and she was tempted to turn the meaning that was in it against himself, much as she pitied him.

“You know, Emmeline,” he added, “I believe very little in the fortune, or misfortune, to which men attribute their successes and reverses.  They are useful impersonations to novelists; but my opinion is sufficiently high of flesh and blood to believe that we make our own history without intervention.  Accidents?—­Terrible misfortunes?—­What are they?—­Good-night.”

“Good-night,” she said, looking sad and troubled.  “When I said, ‘misfortune,’ I meant, of course, that he is to blame; but—­shall I leave you his letter to me?”

“I think I have enough to meditate upon,” he replied, coldly bowing.

“God bless you,” she whispered.  “And—­may I say it? do not shut your heart.”

He assured her that he hoped not to do so and the moment she was gone he set about shutting it as tight as he could.

If, instead of saying, Base no system on a human being, he had said, Never experimentalize with one, he would have been nearer the truth of his own case.  He had experimented on humanity in the person of the son he loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have failed, all humanity’s failings fell on the shoulders of his son.  Richard’s parting laugh in the train—­it was explicable now:  it sounded in his ears like the mockery of this base nature of ours at every endeavour to exalt and chasten it.  The young man had plotted this.  From step to step Sir Austin traced the plot.  The curious mask he had worn since his illness; the selection of his incapable uncle Hippias for a companion in preference to Adrian; it was an evident, well-perfected plot.  That hideous laugh would not be silenced:  Base, like the rest, treacherous, a creature of passions using his abilities solely to gratify them—­never surely had humanity such chances as in him!  A Manichaean tendency, from which the sententious eulogist of nature had been struggling for years (and which was partly at the bottom of the System), now began to cloud and usurp dominion of his mind.  As he sat alone in the forlorn dead-hush of his library, he saw the devil.