a philanthropist; the
common thief was sent to jail.

Dartmouth threw back his head and clasped his hands behind it. Of
what use rehearsing platitudes? The laws of morality were concocted to
ensure the coherence and homogeneity of society; therefore, whatever
deleteriously affected society was crime of less or greater magnitude.
He and Sioned Penrhyn had ruined the lives and happiness of two
people, had made a murderer of the one, and irrevocably hardened the
nature of the other: Catherine Dartmouth had lived to fourscore, and
had died with unexpiated wrong on her conscience. They had left two
children half-orphaned, and they had run the risk of disgracing two
of the proudest families in Great Britain. Nothing, doubtless, but the
cleverness and promptitude of Sir Dafyd Penrhyn, the secretive nature
of Catherine Dartmouth, the absence of rapid-news transit, and the
semi-civilization of Constantinople at that time, had prevented the
affair from becoming public scandal. Poor Weir! how that haughty head
of hers would bend if she knew of her grandmother's sin, even did she
learn nothing of her own and that sin's kinship!

Dartmouth got up and walked slowly down the long room, his hands
clasped behind him, his head bent. Heaven knew his "sins" had been
many; and if disaster had never ensued, it had been more by good luck
than good management. And yet--he could trace a certain punishment in
every case; the woman punished by the hardening of her nature and
the probability of complete moral dementia; the man by satiety and an
absolute loss of power to value what he possessed. Therefore, for the
woman a sullen despair and its consequences; for the man a feverish
striving for that which he could never find, or, if found, would have
the gall in the nectar of having let slip the ability to unreservedly
and innocently enjoy.

And if sin be measured by its punishment! He recalled those years in
eternity, with their hell of impotence and inaction. He recalled the
torment of spirit, the uncertainty worse than death. And Weir? Surely
no two erring mortals had ever more terribly reaped the reward of
their wrong-doing.

What did it signify? That he was to give her up? that a love which had
begun in sin must not end in happiness? But his love had the strength
of its generations; and the impatient, virile, control-disdaining
nature of the man rebelled. Surely their punishment had been severe
enough and long enough. Had they not been se