"compunctious visitings of
Nature." He kept his head and turned King's evidence.

In the case of the Peltzer brothers we have a man who is of good social
position, falling desperately in love with the wife of a successful
barrister. The wife, though unhappy in her domestic life, refuses to
become her lover's mistress; marriage is the only way to secure her. So
Armand Peltzer plots to murder the husband. For this purpose he calls in
the help of a brother, a ne'er-do-well, who has left his native country
under a cloud. He sends for this dubious person to Europe, and there
between them they plan the murder of the inconvenient husband. Though
the idea of the crime comes from the one brother, the other receives the
idea without repugnance and enters wholeheartedly into the commission of
the murder. The ascendency of the one is evident, but he knows his
man, is sure that he will have no difficulty in securing the other's
co-operation in his felonious purpose. Armand Peltzer should have lived
in the Italy of the Renaissance.

The crime was cunningly devised, and methodically and successfully
accomplished. Only an over-anxiety to secure the fruits of it led to its
detection. Barre and Lebiez are a perfect criminal couple, both young
men of good education, trained to better things, but the one idle,
greedy and vicious, the other cynical, indifferent, inclined at best to
a lazy sentimentalism. Barre is a needy stockbroker at the end of his
tether, desperate to find an expedient for raising the wind, Lebiez
a medical student who writes morbid verses to a skull and lectures on
Darwinism. To Barre belongs the original suggestion to murder an old
woman who sells milk and is reputed to have savings. But his friend
and former schoolfellow, Lebiez, accepts the suggestion placidly, and
reconciles himself to the murder of an unnecessary old woman by the
same argument as that used by Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment" to
justify the killing of his victim.

In all the cases here quoted the couples are essentially criminal
couples. From whichever of the two comes the first suggestion of crime,
it falls on soil already prepared to receive it; the response to the
suggestion is immediate. In degree of guilt there is little or nothing
to choose between them. But the more interesting instances of dual crime
are those in which one innocent hitherto of crime, to whom it is morally
repugnant, is persuaded by another to the commission of a cri