soul in hell.

He got up from the breakfast-table, feeling strangely unhappy and
weighed down with guilt. Yet, as he looked at the painter's worn face
and hollow eyes, his heart murmured, perhaps deceitfully, "You are
justified."

"I must go out. I must go into the village," he said.

"In this weather?"

"We islanders think nothing of it. We pursue our business though the
heavens crack and the sea touches the clouds."

He went out hurriedly and with the air of a man painfully abashed. Once
beyond the churchyard, in the plough-land of the island road, he
continued his tormented reverie of the night. Never before had he done
evil that good might come. He had never supposed that good could come
out of evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly
fallacy, to be combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was
chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which had caused him
to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures
whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like
many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed
to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight
hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. But he was
emotional. He was full of pity. He desired to bandage the wounded world,
to hush its cries of pain, to rock it to rest, even though he believed
that suffering was its desert. And to the individual, more especially,
he was very tender. Like a foolish woman, perhaps, he told himself
to-day as he walked on heavily in the wild wind, debating his deed of
the night and its consequences.

He had erased the name of Pringle from the stone that covered little
Jack, the wonder-child. And he felt like a criminal. Yet he dreaded the
sequel of a discovery by the painter, that his fears were well founded,
that his sea urchin had indeed been claimed by the hunger of the sea.
Uniacke had worked in cities and had seen much of sad men. He had learnt
to read them truly for the most part, and to foresee clearly in many
instances the end of their journeys. And his ministrations had taught
him to comprehend the tragedies that arise from the terrible intimacy
which exists between the body and its occupant the soul. He could not
tell, as a doctor might have been able to tell, whether the morbid
condition into which Sir Graham had come was primarily due to ill-health
of the mind acting upon the bo