“You would find it if you looked far enough, without a doubt!” answered the doctor decidedly. “This is a most interesting subject, Dennis, and it’s one that it’s very difficult to look into without upsetting the whole theory of moral responsibility, and doing more harm than enough. I don’t say Romayne was mad, as the word is usually understood, but all you tell me confirms a notion I have had about him ever since this affair came out. He was what we call morally insane. I’ll tell you what first put the idea into my head. It was the extraordinary obtuseness, the extraordinary want of perception, of that blunder of his that burst up the whole thing. Look at it for yourself. It was a flaw in his comprehension of moral sense only possible in a man who knew of the quality by hearsay alone. He must have been a very remarkable man. I wish I had known him!” “I have heard the term ‘moral insanity,’ of course,” said Falconer slowly and distastefully, ignoring the doctor’s last, purely æsthetic sentence, “but it has always seemed to me, doctor, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a very dangerous tampering with things that should be sacred even from science. I cannot believe that any man is actually incapable of knowing right from wrong.” “The difficulty is,” said the doctor drily, “that the words right and wrong sometimes convey nothing to him, as the words red and blue convey nothing to a colour-blind man, and the endearments of his wife convey nothing to the lunatic who is convinced that she is trying to poison him.” He paused a moment, and then said abruptly: “Are there any children?” Falconer glanced at him and changed colour slightly. “Yes,” he said slowly. “One boy!” The keen, shrewd face of the elder man softened suddenly and indescribably under one of those quick sympathetic impulses which were Dr. Aston’s great charm. “Heaven help his mother!” he said gently. Falconer moved quickly and protestingly, and there was a touch of something like rebuke in his voice as he said: “Doctor, you don’t mean to say that you think----”