its breast worn
away with beating against the bars.

"I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with
the bars which he was to know so well--the bars of the prison that he
had made with his own hands.

He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He
stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window
at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has
met his eye every morning of his life and finds it--gone. It was
incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the
abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently
to a stand-still.

_His mother!_

His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own
hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned, and thrust the thought from
him. It was too sharp. He could not suffer it.

His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He
had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was
out of all proportion to his offence. And, like some malignant
infectious disease, retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on
those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust,
unjust, unjust!

A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any
one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against
Lady Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted
him. This was undoubtedly true, though not probably the view which her
guardian angel would take of the matter.

Among the letters which the servant had brought him he suddenly
recognized that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger
and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why
was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" etc., etc. He knew
the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up
deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty fireplace, and put
a match to it. He watched it burn.

It was his first overt act of rebellion against her yoke, the first step
along the nearest of the many well-worn paths that a man takes at random
to leave a woman. It did not occur to him that Lady Newhaven might have
written to him about his encounter with her husband. He knew Lord
Newhaven well enough to be absolutely certain that he would mention the
subject to no living creature, least of all to his wife.

"Neither will I," he said to himself;