mself with a sudden fierce
concentration of will. "So much I will claim--and enforce."

But not now, nothing now, but patience, delicacy, prudence. He gathered
himself together with a long breath, and went his way.

* * * * *

For the rest, the clash of motives and affections he felt and foresaw in
this matter of the Disley murders, became day by day more harassing. The
moral debate was strenuous enough. The murders had roused all the humane
and ethical instincts, which were in fact the man, to such a point that
they pursued him constantly, in the pauses of his crowded days, like
avenging Erinnyes. Hallin's remark that "game-preserving creates crime"
left him no peace. Intellectually he argued it, and on the whole
rejected it; morally, and in feeling, it scourged him. He had suffered
all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he,
more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was
natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on
Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and
limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and
responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.

But, as Marcella had been obliged to perceive, he drew the sharpest line
between the bearings of this ghastly business on his own private life
and action, and its relation to public order. That the gamekeepers
destroyed were his servants, or practically his servants, made no
difference to him whatever in his estimate of the crime itself. If the
circumstances had been such that he could honestly have held Hurd not to
be a murderer, no employer's interest, no landlord's desire for
vengeance, would have stood in his way. On the other hand, believing, as
he emphatically did, that Hurd's slaying of Westall had been of a kind
more deliberate and less capable of excuse than most murders, he would
have held it a piece of moral cowardice to allow his own qualms and
compunctions as to the rights and wrongs of game-preserving to interfere
with a duty to justice and society.

Ay! and something infinitely dearer to him than his own qualms and
compunctions.

Hallin, who watched the whole debate in his friend day by day, was
conscious that he had never seen Aldous more himself, in spite of
trouble of mind; more "in character," so to speak, than at this moment.
Spiritual dignity of mind and temper, blended with a painful personal
humility, and int