man
was tempted to crime by _my_ property--on _my_ land. I should think it
right to look at it altogether from the public point of view. The
satisfaction of my own private compunctions--of my own private
feelings--is not what I ought to regard. My own share in the
circumstances, in the conditions which made such an act possible does
indeed concern me deeply. You cannot imagine but that the moral problem
of it has possessed me ever since this dreadful thing happened. It
troubled me much before. Now, it has become an oppression--a torture. I
have never seen my grandfather so moved, so distressed, in all my
remembrance of him. Yet he is a man of the old school, with the old
standards. As for me, if ever I come to the estate I will change the
whole system, I will run no risks of such human wreck and ruin as
this--"

His voice faltered.

"But," he resumed, speaking steadily again, "I ought to warn you that
such considerations as these will not affect my judgment of this
particular case. In the first place, I have no quarrel with capital
punishment as such. I do not believe we could rightly give it up. Your
attitude properly means that wherever we can legitimately feel pity for
a murderer, we should let him escape his penalty. I, on the other hand,
believe that if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would
himself _claim_ his own death, as his best chance, his only chance--in
this mysterious universe!--of self-recovery. Then it comes to this--was
the act murder? The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears
to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--"

"You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the
world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and
administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the
lawbreaker!"

He looked troubled.

"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them,"
he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our
own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because
it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to
what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof
we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in
ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what
that power may be!"

He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were,
by himself--then turning back to