The bishop was particularly glad to learn, as everybody on the island had learnt, the minutest details of this sordid legal affair.  It seemed likewise to have been providentially arranged, in order to afford him an insight into the administration of local law, and some notion of what would have been in store for his cousin had she applied for relief from Muhlen’s persecutions to Signor Malipizzo, his intimate friend.  There would have been no justice for her—­not from that quarter.  He would probably have forbidden the child to be moved out of his jurisdiction, pending the progress of a trial which might never end.  Nor could the English Court, with its obsolete provisions on this head, have regarded Muhlen otherwise than as her legal husband—­the child of her later union as illegitimate.  Bastardy:  a taint for life!  How well she had done to put herself beyond a rancorous letter of the law; to protect her child and family according to the immutable instincts of mankind!

The Nepenthe magistrate had shown what he was capable of, in his bestial dealings with a half-witted lad and those harmless Russian lunatics—­the first one saved through the intervention of a cut-throat politician, and the second . . . well, he did not exactly know how the Muscovites had been able to regain their freedom but, remembering what Keith had told him about Miss Wilberforce, her periodical imprisonments and his periodical bribes, he shrewdly suspected some underhand practices on the part of that gentleman at the instigation, very possibly, of the charming Madame Steynlin.  Signor Malipizzo’s cruel travesty of justice—­how unfavourably it compared with his cousin’s altogether satisfactory, straightforward and businesslike handling of Muhlen’s little affair!

Doubtless she suffered intensely.  He called to mind her looks, her voice, during that first interview at the villa Mon Repos; he thought it likely that, but for her child and husband, she would have taken her own life in order to escape from this villain.  And doubtless she had weighed the matter in her own mind.  Sensible people do not take steps of this gravity without reflecting on the possible consequences.  She must have tried her hardest to talk Muhlen over, before coming to the conclusion that thee was nothing to be done with the fellow.  She knew him; she knew her own mind.  She knew better than anyone else what was in store for her if Muhlen got the upper hand.  Her home broken up; her child a bastard; herself and Meadows—­social outcasts; all their three lives ruined.  Mrs. Meadows, plainly, did not relish such a prospect.  She did not see why her existence should be wrecked because a scoundrel happened to be supported by a disreputable paragraph of the Code.  Muhlen was a troublesome insect.  He must be brushed aside.  Ridiculous to call such a thing a tragedy!

He thought of the insignificance of a human life.  Thousands of decent upright folks swept away at a blow. . . .  Who cared?  One dirty blackmailer more or less:  what on earth did it matter to anybody?