nches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal. The
press was in one of its occasional Jedburgh justice moods, and was ready
to afford impartial trial when it had hanged its victim, and not before.

Paul Armstrong was adjudged a Lothario of the wickeder sort, a purposed
betrayer of hearts and destinies. 'If, as the complainant in this
melancholy case avers,' or 'If, as the depositions already filed would
appear to indicate,' the defendant was an unlimited rascal; and if that
were so, he _was_ an unlimited rascal, and there an end. A thousand
men file past the bar of official and unofficial justice without much
comment They are branded, more or less justly, in accord with their
deserts, and having been first ignored, are altogether forgotten. But
every here and there, for some scarcely notable peculiarity, a man or
woman is fairly hunted down by the moral pack, mangled and branded,
as it were, on a noble moral speculation, and left to quiver for the
remnant of his lifetime.

In these days Paul Armstrong pondered much and often over the saying of
the man who had been his master in the arts of fiction and the drama:
'Men reserve their bitterest repentances for their best actions.' If
only he had played the man of the world towards Annette instead of
playing the Quixote, how different a position he would have held towards
the moral pack! To marry your mistress under no compulsion, but merely
in the desire to relieve the last sufferings of a parting soul, to
sacrifice a year or two of pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had
not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly
intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle
prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the
contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society
of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch
if he had at last yielded to the claims of that domesticity which
offered him involuntary shelter: the invitations of a home of love and
confidence; an atmosphere in which no cloud hovered which could not be
puffed away in a cloud of tobacco smoke, or shattered into nothing by
the clear breath of a single friendly laugh. It was not quite an
honest view of the case--no man surveying his own circumstances is ever
entirely honest--but to himself the question was convincing, Who would
not have hastened from that hell to find this heaven?

Ralston at leas