He remembered his last conversation with Lord Cheriton on that subject—remembered how Cheriton had said that he believed Godfrey Carmichael incapable of a dishonourable action—incapable of having behaved cruelly to any woman. Had he who pronounced that judgment been guilty of dishonour—had he been cruel to the woman who sacrificed herself for him? There are so many degrees in such wrong-doing! There is the sin of impulse: there is the deliberate betrayal, the coldly planned iniquity, the sin of the practised seducer who has reduced seduction to a science, and who has no more heart or conscience than a machine. There is the sin of the generous man, who finds his feet caught in the web of circumstance, who begins, innocently enough, by pitying a neglected wife, and ends by betraying the neglectful husband. Theodore gave his kinsman credit for belonging to the category of generous sinners. Indeed, the fact that he had lived aloof from the world for many years, sharing the isolation of the woman who loved him, was in itself evidence that he had not acted as a villain; yet it was possible that when the final hour came, the hour for breaking those illicit bonds, the rupture may have been in somewise cruel; and the remembrance of that cruelty might be a burden upon the sinner’s conscience at this day. Such partings can never be without cruelty. The fact that one sinner is to marry and begin a new life, while the other sinner is to finish her days in a dishonoured widowhood, is in itself a cruelty. She may submit, as to a fate which she foresaw dimly, even in the hour of her fall—but she would be more than human if she did not think herself hardly used by the man who forsakes her. Nothing he can do to secure her worldly comfort or to screen her from the world’s disdain will take the sting out of that parting. The one fact remains that her day is done. He has ceased to care for her, and he has begun to care for another. “Nothing has occurred since I was here to throw any new light upon the murder, I suppose?” Theodore said quietly, as they smoked their cigars, walking slowly up and down in the summer night. “Nothing.” “Did her ladyship tell you that I have met a girl in London, whom I believe to be no other than Mercy Porter?” “Yes, she told me something about that fancy of yours, for I take it to be nothing more than a fancy. The world is too wide for you and Mercy Porter to meet so easily. What was your ground for identifying her with the lodge-keeper’s girl?” “The lodge-keeper’s girl!” There was something needlessly contemptuous in the phrase, it seemed to Theodore: a studied disdain.