to go and
tell him frankly what he had learnt, and to take, not only his opinion,
but also his advice on the subject.

He found Sir Godfrey at home, and the judge quickly saw that he had not
called upon any ordinary concern, so he asked him to come and smoke a
pipe in his den, and there Sir Arthur, taking up the thread where it had
been dropped years before, told him in a few straight, short sentences
the rest of the story to the end of his interview with Miss Carol.

"Of course, you will understand, Raleigh," he said, when he had
finished, "I have told you this because I thought it was only right to
do so. My boy is engaged to marry your girl. It is quite plain, I am
sorry to say, that this alcoholic taint is in him, and as I have told
you this Miss Carol Vane, charming and all as I must confess her to be
from what I have seen of her, is after all Vane's half-sister, and she
is also what I told you she was."

"Well, my dear Maxwell, I must confess that that is a very difficult
problem indeed for us to decide. Very difficult indeed," Sir Godfrey had
replied.

"You see, to put it quite plainly, and, if as an old lawyer I may say
so, from the judicial point of view, there are two courses open to us.
First, we may or, I would rather say, we _might_ adopt the strictly
scientific view of the matter and say that, since the unfortunate woman
who was once your wife has apparently transmitted the taint of
alcoholism to your son, it would therefore be improper for him to marry
Enid for fear that he should further transmit this taint to his own
offspring.

"That, I suppose, is the way in which a coldblooded scientist would put
it; but on the other hand I think the matter should also be considered
from the purely human point of view, and here, I speak again as an old
judge. When you married your wife you had no notion that she had
inherited this taint of insanity, as we may well call it, from some
unknown ancestor. Now the same thing might have happened with my wife,
or in fact, with any other woman.

"It is perfectly well known that this poison, as one is obliged to call
it, may lie latent for generations; may, in fact, die out altogether. On
the other hand, what might have been only a vice in the grandfather or
the father may develop as insanity in the grandson or the son. It is not
for us to decide these things, at least, that is my view.

"You and I have more experience, more judgment; but I think that your
son and my