ell! They were going to give him
degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading
associates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living
with any one at all. They were going to do this for year upon year, all
the rest of his life, since he never could survive it. He was to have
nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts--his
thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to
want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their
livelihood! He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby
Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that.
It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to
be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be
worse than Judas--who at least could hang himself.

He got up and went to a mirror in the corner of the room. The mere sight
of himself made the impossible seem more impossible. He was so fine a
specimen--he could not but know it!--so much the free man, the honorable
man, the man of the world! He tried to see himself with his hair clipped
and his beard shaven and the white cravat and waistcoat replaced by the
harlequin costume of the jailbird. He tried to see himself making his
own bed, and scrubbing his own floor, and standing at his cell door with
a tin pot in his hand, waiting for his skilly. It was so absurd, so out
of the question, that he nearly laughed outright. He was in a dream--in
a nightmare! He shook himself, he pinched himself, in order to wake up.
He was ready in sudden rage to curse the handsome, familiar room for the
persistence of its reality, because the rows of books and the Baxter
prints and the desks and chairs and electric lights refused to melt away
like things in a troubled sleep.

It was then that for the first time he began to taste the real measure
of his impotence. He was in the hand of the law. He was in the grip of
the sternest avenging forces human society could set in motion against
him; and, quibbles, shifts, and subterfuges swept aside, no one knew
better than himself that his punishment would be just.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of having put himself outside the
scope of mercy. But there he was! There could never be a word spoken in
his defense, nor in any one's heart a throb of sympathy toward him. He
had forfeited everything. He could expect nothing from any man, and from
his daugh