So that was his verdict, given with all his deliberation, with all the weight of his leisurely broad-viewing judgment. The real thing to avoid was not the "row;" that was his conclusion. There was a thing, then, worse than the "row"--the thing for which Halton and Nutley--nay, all Meriton, would soon be making joyful preparation. His calm face had not moved even at her word "bloodshed." Oh yes, Andy was thorough! Not even that word swayed his mind. Perhaps he did not believe in her fears. But his look had not been scornful; it had been thoughtfully interrogative. He had possessed that knowledge of his for a long while; he had never used it. At first from loyalty to Harry--even now that would, she thought, be enough to make him very loth to use it. But another reason was predominant, born of his long silent brooding. He had come to a conclusion about his hero; the court had taken time for consideration; the judgment was advised. There was no helping some people. They must be left to their own ways, their own devices, their own doom. To help them was to harm others; to fight for them was to serve under the banner of wrong and of injustice. Friendship and loyalty could not justify that. The conclusion seemed a hard one. She stood long at the big window--a dainty little figure thrown up by the light behind her--painfully reaching forward to the understanding of how what seems hardness may be a broader, a truer, a better-directed sympathy, how it may be a duty to leave a wastrel to waste, how not every drowning man is worth the labour that it takes to get him out of the water--for that once. At all events, not worth the risk of another, a more valuable life. And that was his conclusion about his hero, the man to whom he owed, as he had said, almost everything he prized? Had he, then, any right to the conclusion, right in the abstract though it might be? It was a hard world that drove men to such hard conclusions.