ubject of the landlady's demands. Ultimately, however, he
admitted with discontent the advisability of letting Mrs. Rendal have
something on account. Though it was Saturday night, he let hour after
hour go by and showed no disposition to leave home; to Pennyloaf's
surprise, he sat almost without moving by the fire, absorbed in thought.

Genuine respect for law is the result of possessing something which the
law exerts itself to guard. Should it happen that you possess nothing,
and that your education in metaphysics has been grievously neglected,
the strong probability is, that your mind will reduce the principle of
society to its naked formula: Get, by whatever means, so long as with
impunity. On that formula Bob Hewett was brooding; in the hours of this
Saturday evening he exerted his mind more strenuously than ever before
in the course of his life. And to a foregone result. Here is a man with
no moral convictions, with no conscious relations to society save those
which are hostile, with no personal affections; at the same time,
vaguely aware of certain faculties in himself for which life affords no
scope and encouraged in various kinds of conceit by the crass stupidity
of all with whom he associates. It is suggested to him all at once that
there is a very easy way of improving his circumstances, and that by
exercise of a certain craft with which he is perfectly familiar; only,
the method happens to be criminal. 'Men who do this kind of thing are
constantly being caught and severely punished. Yes; men of a certain
kind; not Robert Hewett. Robert Hewett is altogether an exceptional
being; he is head and shoulders above the men with whom he mixes; he is
clever, he is remarkably good-looking. If anyone in this world, of a
truth Robert Hewett may reckon on impunity when he sets his wits
against the law. Why, his arrest and punishment is an altogether
inconceivable thing; he never in his life had a charge brought against
him.'

Again and again it came back to that. Every novice in unimpassioned
crime has that thought, and the more self-conscious the man, the more
impressed with a sense of his own importance, so much the weightier is
its effect with him.

We know in what spirit John Hewett regarded rebels against the law. Do
not imagine that any impulse of that nature actuated his son. Clara
alone had inherited her father's instinct of revolt. Bob's temperament
was, in a certain measure, that of the artist; he felt without