It was after seven o’clock when they got back from the sail; and all the ladies hurried into the break, lest they should lose that calm leisure before dinner which a perfect toilet demands. Mr. Sewall and Lord Birmingham and Caryl Wemyss were further specially honored with seats therein; the others walked, Townley with Van Kull and Starbuck, Arthur with Lionel Derwent. “What a different man is Sewall from what one would suppose,” said Arthur. “Sidney Sewall is the most guilty criminal in America,” said Derwent, vehemently. Arthur started a little at so superlative a characterization; which Derwent went on to explain. “There is a man with all the birthright of light; with the inherited instinct of truth, the training of character, the charm of breeding; with power of intellect and cultivation of the finest that your country gives; and if there is a malignant lie to be disseminated, a class-hatred to be stirred up, a cruel delusion to be spread, a poisonous virus of any subtler sort ready to be instilled into the body public and politic--there stands Sidney Sewall, of all men, ready and willing to do the devil’s work. And he does it with the genius of a Lucifer; and all to get his personal luxury, and his orchids and his wines, and a little power, and revenge for personal spites. Mephistopheles himself was not so quick at seeing the evil side of any human error, the wrong that may be wrought from any chance event. And yet it does not even pay; or pay any more than if he chose the good and served it with half that intellect of his that now seeks to sap his country’s soul!” Poor Arthur had not thought to reap such a whirlwind with his little conversational seed, and stood aghast. “And he doesn’t really care for money either; he knows its worthlessness, deep down, as well as I do. And he hasn’t even, or he says he hasn’t, the devil’s motive of ambition to make a reason for his wrong. And he’s married a rich woman, like any common adventurer. I tell you I have spent years in this country of yours; and the people have a heart, and a soul, and in their clumsy way they blunder ahead upon the right. But Sewall! He has no heart, nor soul, but only stomach and cerebral matter, like a jelly-fish. In his intellectual Frankenstein way, when fresh from his Ohio farm, he was once a communist; just as he might be to-morrow a dynamiter. But if to-morrow there comes to the polls a well-meaning, honest man, and against him a very figurehead of that greed and cynical materialism which bids fair to blast your country in its bud, this man will hasten to bid the people to choose Barabbas, that Cain and Abel’s strife may be on earth once more.”