ad been proven such a thorough rogue, and the
company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that,
even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to
be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was
of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather
dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular
offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like
him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for
many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given
the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great
solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have
read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more
than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of
keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room,
and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and
as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a
kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend
of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply
said, "It was unjust," and we parted.

For several months after Tedham's conviction, I did not think we ought
to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we
ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased,
but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.
That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham's little girl, as she
flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in
black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we
stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain
gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic,
at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor
Tedham's own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this
heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his
daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was
not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of
Tedham's affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the
accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had
returned into the presence of that bitter sorr