I left at once, glad enough to have finished the hateful business. Did I do right in what might be called running this man to earth? What less could I have done than what I did? It seems most natural that there should be some filial regard of a child for a parent, but I could never, from the time I first saw him, so hardened and devilish, looking down on my weeping mother, feel the least respect, much less love for him as a father, and could only think of him as a wicked, contemptible, living thing. Other thoughts I have had. The chaplains must have known the character of this man, and yet they appointed or allowed him to conduct the religious services in church; his associates must have known of his amours, intrigues and seductions, for such things cannot be concealed, but they probably were as deep in the mire as he was in the mud, so very likely no one ever checked him in his career of lust and crime. Society must have known all about him, yet he was the swell cad of them all, the admired and intimate friend of the ladies. What delicate tastes some ladies have! He was called a Christian too, and he would no doubt have taken it as an insult if any one had hinted otherwise. A Christian! I have read the story of a wicked man, who, being angry with his wife, took their child to a wood and murdered it. Then taking some of its flesh he returned home, and sending his wife on an errand put the flesh into a curry that she was preparing. Unheeding the child’s absence, the woman presently ate of the curry, when the inhuman father told her what he had done. Crazed with horror the wretched mother fled to the jungle and destroyed herself. This wicked man belonged to a wild jungle tribe of heathen, but there is not a heathen so low and degraded but would hold up his hands in horror at such an unnatural crime. But here is a Christian, an intelligent man, of good standing in the upper class of English society, who murdered his wife, my mother, as much as if he had put a noose around her neck and strangled her. He discarded his own children; left them to poverty and starvation. He seduces his own daughter, my sister, and becomes grandfather to his own child! Tell me, O God! and all thinking beings on the earth, who was the worse, that heathen wicked man, or this so-called Christian gentleman? CHAPTER XXI.