Yes, I told them, in replying to questioning, there was Mrs. Parsons and her son and a daughter. Mr. Parsons was dead. His son had always loved the country, and having inherited a small farm from an uncle, he and his mother and sister had gone to live on it. Was the daughter pretty? I did not know. I had not seen her for some years, and girls change so. The son was the same age as I was. No, we had not gone to the same school, and he did not know Grahame Hallward. Our acquaintance had come of our living near each other. I changed the subject as soon as possible. Soon after I found occasion to say that I had met young Parsons in London, and that he had asked me to go down and spend a few days at their farm near Norwich. I felt the whole thing to be lamentably clumsy. It would have been better to get to know someone near Mr. Gascoyne’s rectory, but it was done, and as soon as I had finished with the Parsons family I intended to ship them all off to Canada, where there are as many farms as the imagination can desire. When I declared that I must accept their invitation, or Mrs. Parsons and her children would be hurt, I fancy Miss Gascoyne’s face lighted. I was sure that she had endowed me with all sorts of good qualities to which I could lay no claim. She was touched at my consideration for the Parsons’ feelings. She was a woman incapable of giving love where she could not give respect. The world only knowing me through the medium of a trial for murder has no doubt made up its mind that anyone who could respect me must have been a very bad judge of character. The world, however, is not itself a very good judge of character. To man, his fellow-creatures are as a rule divided into two classes, viz.: the penny plain and twopence coloured. If Mr. Brown has been found with Mr. Jones’s wife, Mr. Brown is a complete and wholly irreclaimable blackguard. That he has been an honest citizen, an attentive husband, and an irreproachable father hitherto counts for nothing. These virtues only aggravate the offence, inasmuch as they are shown by the nature of his guilt to have been mere hypocrisies. Public exposure is the real guilt in his fellow-men’s eyes. The old, old crime of being found out is the unforgivable offence. They know in their hearts that he is rather a fine fellow, that his slip is what might have happened to any of them. They have probably some such little liability still unpaid standing to their own account, but this does not make them one whit the less severe in judging their foolish fellow who has been discovered. It is thus. A man who has been in the dock and has been convicted loses the right to claim any virtues. As for a man who has been convicted of murder! What can be said for him? Just as he has been found guilty of the crime the law holds most wicked, so must he be capable of committing all those crimes which murder is supposed to take precedence of.