Could he have resisted the temptation to strike Sir Launcelot? Or could he not? His hand had stirred to deal that blow, at the bidding of the bitter anger in his heart, as instinctively and almost as unconsciously as the indignant blood had rushed to the cheek. What had stirred the sudden movement of anger in his heart? Far bitterer words from the lips of a stranger had not moved him as those mocking tones of Sir Launcelot's. The strength of that fatal impulse was but the accumulated force of the irritation of countless petty provocations, not retaliated outwardly, but suffered to ferment in the heart. Nor was that last sin altogether rooted in sin. Roger's search into his own heart was made with too intense a desire of being true to himself and to God for him to fall into that blind passion of self-accusing. It had been more than half-rooted in justice, just anger against injustice, generous indignation against ungenerous slander, truth revolting against falsehood. And so gradual (and in part so just) had been the growth of deep-rooted detestation of Sir Launcelot's character, that the last act--which might have been crime in the eyes of man, which was crime in the eyes of God, whose judgment is not measured by consequences--had become almost as irresistible and instinctive as the movement of the eyelid to sweep a grain of dust from the eye. When, then, could he have begun to resist? When would it have been possible to stem the little stream which had swollen into a torrent that had all but swept his life into ruin? Where was the point where sin and virtue, hatred which leads to murder, and justice which is the foundation of all virtue, began to intertwine until they were ravelled inextricably beyond his power to sever or distinguish? Had there ever been such a point? Must not all, he being as he was by nature, and things being as they were, and Sir Launcelot being as he was, have necessarily gone on as it had, and led to the result it led to? But here came in the low inextinguishable voice of conscience. "This anguish is no fruit of inevitable necessity. It was sin--it was sin. I have sinned." And then-- "I have sinned, because there is sin _in me_. Sin in me; no mere detached faults, no isolated wrong acts, but a fountain of evil within me, from which every evil thing proceeds. Out of the heart--out of the heart; not from without, not something merely in me. It is _I myself_ that am sinful, that have sinned. This one evil thing, which, unlike all other seemingly evil things, storms or frosts, or corruption and death itself, never produces good fruit, but only evil fruit, is springing is an inexhaustible flow from the depths of my innocent being."