ple which taught nothing beyond the satisfaction of
ambition and the pursuit of power. It was well then if Quisante were
indeed, as he himself said, "done with," so far as public activity went.
Marchmont, not concealing his particular interest but rather facing it
and declaring it just, went on to say that, since Quisante was done with
publicly, it was well that he should be done with privately also, and
that as speedily as might be. Love for May Quisante might be the moving
spring of this conclusion, but he insisted that it was not necessary
thereto. Any reasonable person her friend, nay, anybody whose attention
was fairly directed to the case, must hold the same view. There was a
hideous mistake to be undone, and only one way of undoing it. Permanent
unions in marriage, immense and indispensable engines of civilisation,
yet exacted their price. One instance of the compensating payment was
that deaths sometimes became desirable; you had to wish a death sooner
than life-long misery for a friend; to wish it was not wrong, though to
have to wish it might be distasteful. In this self-justification he
contrived to subordinate, while he admitted, his own strong interest in
the death and his violent dislike of the sufferer which robbed the death
of its pain so far as he was concerned. People's infatuation with
Quisante, above all May's infatuation, had so irritated him that he did
not scruple to accept the only means of ending them; that they would be
thus ended it never came into his mind to doubt. His regret was only for
the stretch of delay, for the time of waiting, for the respite promised
to the doomed man if he would be docile and obedient; for all of them
life was passing, and too much had already in tragic mistake been spent
on Alexander Quisante.

"I think you're damnably inhuman," said Dick Benyon, expressing, as he
often did, an unsophisticated but not perhaps an altogether unsound
popular judgment. "He's a remarkable man. And after all she married him.
She needn't have. As for the party--well, I don't know how we shall
replace him."

"I don't want him replaced," said Marchmont. "Everything that he was
doing had better be left undone; and everything that he is had better not
be. You call me inhuman. Well, people who repress their pity for
individuals in the interests of the general welfare are always called
that."

"Yes, but you don't pity him," retorted Dick.

Marchmont thought for a moment. "No, I don't," he