But his worst ordeal was with Janet. Not a word of explanation had passed between them, yet he was sure she knew everything. One evening, going into her sitting-room, he found her with her knitting on her lap, and a copy of the insular newspaper on the floor, looking out on the lawn with a far-off expression. That brought memories of another evening when he had told her that no girl on the island had ever fallen into trouble through him, or ever should do. "Ah! Is that you, Victor?" she cried, recovering herself and making her needles click, but he had gone, and her voice followed him from the room. Still wrestling with his temptation to stand aside and let the law take its course, Ballamoar became intolerable to him. On the lame excuse of his fortnightly court in the northside town he decided to go to Ramsey, and wrote to Mrs. Quayle to get his old rooms ready. But going from Ballamoar to his chambers was like leaping out of the fire into the furnace. When he opened a disordered drawer up came the Castletown portrait of Bessie Collister like a ghost out of the gloom. When he went for a walk to tire himself for the night his steps involuntarily turned towards the pier where the lighthouse had been shattered by lightning. When he returned and was putting the key in the lock of his outer door he had the tingling sense of a woman's warm presence behind him. When he pulled down his bedroom blind the broken cord brought a stabbing memory. And when he awoke in the morning he felt that he had only to open his eyes to see a girl's raven black hair on the pillow beside him. But Mrs. Quayle's presence was the keenest torment of all. The good old Methodist moved about him at breakfast without speaking, but one morning, fumbling with her bonnet strings before going, she said, "Deemster, have you remembered this case of Bessie Collister in your prayers?" He removed to Douglas--the Fort Anne Hotel, a breezy place, which sits on the ledge of the headland and just over the harbour. At first the babble and movement of the hotel distracted him, but after a day or two he was drawn back into the maelstrom of his own thoughts. Having a private sitting-room he borrowed law books from the Law Library and sat far into the night to read them. He selected the treatises on Infanticide--those bitter records of the age-long strife between the laws of man and of God. Particularly he read the charges of the British Judges (Scottish too frequently), the bewigged ruffians who, in the abomination of their Puritanical tyranny, and the brutal lust of their judicial vengeance, had hounded poor women to the gallows in the very nakedness of shame. "Damn them! Damn them!" he would cry, leaping up with a desire to trample on the dead Judges' graves. But then the same persistent voice within would say, "Wait awhile! Who are you to stand up for justice and mercy?"