His blamelessness in the hideous tragedy which had darkened his life, and the nobility with which he bore himself throughout the monstrous ordeal of blood, claimed all that was strongest and finest in Miss Judy's nature, and touched her romantic imagination as all the brilliant success which came to him later never could have done. It was not for such innocent gentleness as Miss Judy's ever fully to understand the meaning of the tragedy; to comprehend how much more terrible it was than the cruelest destiny of any one man, how much farther reaching through the past and the future than the length of any one man's life. John Stanley himself understood it at the time but dimly. Only by degrees did he come to see the truth: that his forced taking of the life of a man whom he did not know, whom he never had seen or heard of, had not been simply an unavoidable necessity in self-defence, as he had tried to believe,--nor an accident, as the verdict of the law and public opinion had decreed, seeing that it was accidental only so far as his instrumentality was concerned; that he himself was not the victim of chance--_but the helpless transmitter of traditional bloodshed_. It was revealed to him at the trial which acquitted him, that the man whom he thus had been compelled to kill had been driven--ay, even hounded--by public opinion into seeking the life of the man who had taunted him, and in so doing into finding his own death at the hands of a lad who had no quarrel with any one. It was then shown him that the slain and the slayer were equal sacrifices to this monstrous tradition for the shedding of blood. So that, as he began to see, and as he continually looked back upon this blighting tragedy of his boyhood, it thus became--to John Stanley, who was a thinker, and a christian, even in his youth--infinitely more terrible than any really accidental or necessary taking of another's life would have been. He saw in this monstrous deed which he had been forced to commit, the direct result of a tradition of bloody vengeance: the unmistakable outcome of generations of false thinking, of false believing, of false teaching, of false example, of false following; all the rank growth from one poisonous root, all deeply rooted in a false sense of "honor," which, planted by the Power of Evil, had grown into the very life of the people, until it now towered, a deadly upas tree, darkening and poisoning that whole sunny country, almost as darkly and killingly as its murderous kind had ever darkened and poisoned beautiful Corsica.