“Brandon will not agree with you there, I fancy.” “Would he have had us send the man to jail?” Mr. Perry-Hennington’s temperature was still going up steadily. “He says John Smith has been condemned without a trial.” For a reason Joliffe could not explain he was beginning to dislike the vicar intensely. “And he says that if the evidence is to be believed even Jesus had a trial.” “Monstrous!” said the vicar. “A perfectly monstrous parallel!” XXVII THE interview with Dr. Joliffe ruffled the vicar. The repetition of Brandon’s words was ill-timed, nor was it easy to forgive Brandon for uttering them. Action had been taken in the public interest and Mr. Perry-Hennington could not endure a breath of criticism. One way and another it had cost him a good deal. It was only the inspiration of a high and pure motive and the fact that he had no personal ax to grind which had enabled him to carry out the most difficult, the most delicate, and quite the most thankless task in which he had ever been involved. In the vicar’s opinion he had reason to be satisfied with the finesse he had used; moreover, he had not the slightest doubt that the body politic, of which Brandon and Joliffe were members, had been laid under a deep obligation. Certainly he had no need to reproach himself in the matter. Without exciting remark of any kind, a very undesirable person, capable of doing infinite mischief, had been placed out of harm’s way. Officious villagers had been referred to the police; and the vicar hoped to soften any stab his conscience might sustain in regard to the widow by defraying the expenses of her funeral out of his own pocket. In the meantime Brandon had a severe relapse. Any hope of mental serenity had for a time been destroyed. The cause of his friend weighed upon him so heavily that at first it seemed he might not recover from the blow. He mourned him constantly and presently arose the fear that he was about to die. In this perilous phase only one thing stood between the sufferer and the death which in many ways would have been welcome. The will to live was not evoked in him by wife or children or a sense of duty to society; in the last resort it was simply that he felt a sacred task had been laid upon him. His poor friend had been put out of life by the kind of stupidity against which the world has always been defenseless, and from which history is the only court of appeal. But the sense of a great wrong, which henceforward it must be his life’s business to redress, somehow gave Brandon the motive power to continue an existence which had become almost unendurable. He must find the means to vindicate his friend. Lying _in extremis_, with the life of the senses slipping out of his grasp, the idea produced a miraculous rebirth. It contained a germ of the central energy, faint and discreet, yet with the power to imbue a shattered existence with the will to be.