She had been a good girl too. No other man had been allowed to lead her astray. He could hear her voice still, repeating his own words after him: "You _will_ stand up for me, won't you?" and he had promised that he would. He could not cast her off now without being a scoundrel. Could the son of Deemster Stowell be a scoundrel? "No, by God!" A few minutes later he saw himself going back to Bessie and saying, "Look here, my dear girl. It was neither your fault nor mine, but take this, and this, and remember if you ever find it is not enough, there'll be more where that comes from." But no, he could not do that either. If he made the girl take money he would put her in the position of a harlot; and once a woman accepted that position there was no bottom to the unguessed depths to which she might descend. Bessie's future stood up before him like a spectre. Other men, each more brutal than the last, quarrels, violence, all the miseries of such a life--until some day, perhaps, some hideous fact with which he had had nothing to do, would look at him with accusing eyes and say, "You are responsible for this, because you were the first." Down to that moment he had been thinking of the event of last night as a blunder, but now he saw it as a crime. To prevent the possible consequences of that crime he must keep the girl with him, take care of her, protect her as the saying was. But no, that was impossible also. Justification for such a relation there might be--no doubt was--where law or custom or other impediment were keeping apart a man and woman who belonged together. But to put a girl into the position of a mistress, because she was unworthy to be a wife, and to hide her away behind a curtain of duplicity and lies, was to destroy her body and soul. Again Bessie's future stood up before him as a spectre--that high-spirited girl who, but for him, might have married a decent man of her own class, and held her head proud, declining, after a few vain months of fine clothes and idleness, to the condition of a slattern, and going down to the dirt and degeneration of drink. And then he saw that what had happened last night was not merely a crime--it was a sin. But what was he to do? What? What? Just at that moment the sun had come up out of the sea in crimsoning clouds, and the white mist that is the shroud of night had risen above the houses of the town, the steeples of the churches, the hills and the mountain tops, and was vanishing away in that new birth of morning light that is the world's daily resurrection. "I know! I know!" he thought, and he leapt to his feet. He had remembered something that Janet had said about the men of his family--that it had always been a kind of religion with them to do the right. Four hundred years of the Ballamoars and not a stain on the name of any of them! That was something to be born to, wasn't it? It was worth all the titles and honours the world had in it.