Seeing that the guilt of Shuffleton Gibbs was established most clearly in the first examination before the Brazencrook magistrates, it was certainly due to Lionel that he should be regarded as an injured man in that unfortunate apprehension by the Brazencrook chief. All his trouble and sorrow had arisen out of his own pride and want of confidence in the woman whom he professed to love. If he had been content to accept the warning of Paul Somerton that night in London, near the steps of the Ashford Club, what a world of misery he might have been spared; a manly faith in that high-spirited girl at Barton would have saved him. No one saw all this now more clearly than Lionel Hammerton, and what was more, he knew that he had been rightly punished. The only real bit of consolation in the whole business was the prison episode. This was his only real grievance, the only bit of martyrdom in his career. If he could have felt that he had been injured by Amy; if the grievance had been on his side, he might have been more content. It is better to be wronged than to wrong; it is more comfortable to receive an injury than to commit an injustice. All Lionel Hammerton’s troubles had been of his own creation, and family pride was at the bottom of them all. His incarceration was the only injury done to him which he had not courted, which his pride and injustice had not brought upon himself; but it was a source of gratification to him that Amy felt he had undergone this indignity on her account.