It is unquestionably true that the hideous, depraved, and insulting grimace which had so unexpectedly revealed the soul of Douglas Owen, was solely responsible for the maximum sentence of twenty years’ penal servitude that was imposed upon him. If a man continually flouts the angels of grace, he must expect at last to be delivered over to the devil he so devotedly serves. THE HIDDEN BEAST His house is the last in the village. Towards the forest the houses become more and more scattered, reaching out to the wild of the wood as if they yearned to separate themselves from the swarm that clusters about the church and the inn. And his house has taken so long a stride from the others that it is held to the village by no more than the slender thread of a long footpath. Yet the house is set with its face towards us, and has an air of resolutely holding on to the safety of our common life, as if dismayed at its boldness in swimming so far it had turned and desperately grasped the life-line of that footpath. He lived alone, a strange man, surly and reticent. Some said that he had a sinister look; and on those rare occasions when he joined us at the inn, after sunset, he sat aside and spoke little. I was surprised when, as we came out of the inn one night, he took my arm and asked me if I would go home with him. The moon was at the full, and the black shadows of the dispersing crowd that lunged down the street seemed to gesticulate an alarm of weird dismay. The village was momentarily mad with the clatter of footsteps and the noise of laughter, and somewhere down towards the forest a dog was baying. I wondered if I had not misunderstood him. As he watched my hesitation his face pleaded with me. “There are times when a man is glad of company,” he said. We spoke little as we passed through the village towards the silences of his lonely house. But when we came to the footpath he stopped and looked back. “I live between two worlds,” he said, “the wild and ...”--he paused before he rejected the obvious antithesis, and concluded--“the restrained.” “Are we so restrained?” I asked, staring at the huddle of black-and-silver houses clinging to their refuge on the hill. He murmured something about a “compact,” and my thoughts turned to the symbol of the chalk-white church-tower that dominated the honeycomb of the village. “The compact of public opinion,” he said more boldly. My imagination lagged. I was thinking less of him than of the transfiguration of the familiar scene before me. I did not remember ever to have studied it thus under the reflections of a full moon. An echo of his word, differently accented, drifted through my mind. I saw our life as being in truth compact, little and limited.