But Beaumanoir, sitting in the dark with his Smith and Wesson at full cock amid the archives of the house he was concerned to preserve stainless, was aware of none of these tortuous dealings. Had his zeal allowed him to indulge in the luxury of a light, he might have whiled away the time by perusing some of the musty chronicles around him, and have so drawn comfort from the knowledge that if his misdeed was published with the usual trimmings in every paper in the kingdom, he would still compare favorably with some of his race who had gone before. So far he had never stolen poor men’s land under the protection of the Commons Enclosure Act, or appropriated tenants’ improvements to his own enrichment. True, it was a dirty trick he had put his hand to—a dirty trick in dirty company—and he hated himself for it to the full. But he had been a denizen of another world when Ziegler’s emissary had annexed him, body and soul, as plain Charles Hanbury, in the Bowery saloon. He remembered that world now with a horror and a loathing greater, if possible, than when he had endured it—the sordid life in the five-dollar boarding-house, the lunch of tough sandwiches of Texas beef which had bulged his pockets on the way to his duties in the big dry goods store, the insolence of his Irish-American and German fellow-workers because of his English speech. And the haughty salesladies who had drawn their skirts from him as they squeezed past the tame detective at the time-keeper’s box—sitting there in the dark muniment room, even his present trouble could not check a smile at thinking what those damsels would have done if told that he had been about to become a duke within the month. Yes, it had been a dirty trick that he had undertaken to escape all this, but somehow the thing had not seemed so bad when he was unacquainted with the persons interested. Just as old-time smugglers persuaded themselves that there was no dishonesty in defrauding the state, so in the same light he had regarded the spoliation of a big corporation like the Bank of England or the United States Treasury, whichever would have been the ultimate loser when the lawyers had settled the matter. He would never have gone into the business, even in his despairing exile, if he had not looked upon it as a breach of honesty which no single individual would be an appreciable loser. He made no excuses for himself on this score, but merely analyzed his state of mind philosophically, by no means salving his conscience because he had dropped the affair the moment individualities had become involved, or laying claim to any merit for a repentance sustained at such imminent peril.