“Wonderful! No! But you are wonderful, Miss Champney. Wherever you come you bring hope. You have more sympathies than an April day. You are the genius of the spring. The bluebirds are singing to you. You tempt me to be happy. You set me to poetising against the back windows of a schoolhouse where a hundred and fifty innocents are bored to death every day. Tell me your secret, and I'll cure the world. It's sick of an old disease. Old! Some say eternal. But it feels pretty well sometimes, in the spring, or because women are good and beautiful, and tell us that it is impossible not to hope. They seem to tell us to dream on, till we've outdreamed the wrong and so found the right. Wonderful? You are wonderful. The hope of the world looks out of your eyes. I owe you a debt. I owe it to tell you whatever you want to know. I'm as flattered and foolish as you like.” Camilla laughed happily. “Then I shall have to ask questions. For instance, I want to know what you think about the man who shot Mr. Wood.” He glowered a little. “Could I say without seeing him? But you mean about what he did. I think a man's life belongs to him and shouldn't be stolen. I don't like thievery of any kind. I've been trying to show people that men like Wood were disguised thieves, more or less disguised from themselves. I suppose Hicks is no less a murderer because the thing appeared to him in the disguise of a cause. I don't know. They call him so. Murder is illegal killing. They'll probably put him to death, and that will be legal killing. They'll think their motive is good. The motives of the two killings are not so different. Hicks thought his motive was good. I think no man has a right to kill another, legally or illegally. I don't care for the laws. I'd as lief break them as not. They are codified habits, some of them bad habits. Half the laws are crimes against better laws. You can break all the Ten Commandments with perfect legality. The laws allow you to kill and steal under prescribed conditions. Wood stole, and Hicks killed, and most men lie, though only now and then illegally. It's all villainous casuistry. Taking life that doesn't belong to you is worse than taking money that doesn't belong to you, because it's the breach of a better ownership. But Hicks' motive seems better than Wood's. How can one measure the length and breadth of sin? Wood seemed to me more of a thief than most who are in jail, because I felt clearer as to the rights of public property than as to the rights of private property. But I found him a very human man. Hicks is probably no less so. Wood was a likeable----”