Its mockery of his ignoble majesty pursued him everywhere he went. He heard it when he sat on the bench and glowered down at the wretches who came before him with their pleading counselors. It made a vanity of all dignity, of justice. And what was “justice” indeed, but a crime against the helpless? First, their passions swept them into deeds they did not want to commit; then other men seized them and added disgrace to remorse. Which was the higher duty—the father’s to fight the world for his young? Or the judge’s to defend an imaginary ideal against the laws of mercy? His soul was in utter disarray and he found only shame whichever way he turned. He went back to the country perplexed to a frenzy. Patty greeted him with such a look as a sick she-wolf would give the mate that slunk about the den where her young were whimpering. She would not let him see his daughter. He retreated to his library and was too dispirited to build a fire. He stood in the bitter cold and stared through a frost-film at the forlorn moon freezing in a steel-blue sky above an ice-encrusted world. He was shaken from his torpor by a cry, a lancinating shriek, by cry upon cry. He ran like a man shot full of arrows, but the door was locked and Patty called to him to go away. He leaned against the wall, useless, inane, while his child babbled and screamed, then only moaned and was silent a while, then screamed anew, and was silent again. Agony rose and ebbed in her like a quick storm-tide, and he knew that the old hag Nature, the ruthless midwife, was rending and twisting her and rejoicing, laughing triumphantly at every throe. He wondered why he had made no arrangements for Immy to be anæsthetized. It was too late now. This was that holy mystery, that divine crisis for which she was born. He had endured the same torture when Immy was born. But then there was pride and boasting as the recompense; now, the publication of shame, the branding, the scarlet A, and the pillory. Then the nurse had beamed upon him as she placed in his arms for a moment the blessing of heaven. Now, after a maddening delay, Patty would doubtless come to the door and thrust upon him a squirming blanketful of noisy misery and of lifelong disgrace. He began to drift like a prisoner in a cell. Patty would not let him in and he would have been afraid to enter. He went back to his library as an old horse returns to its stall from habit. He paced the floor and stood at the window, guiltily observing the road to see if anyone had heard the clamor and were coming in to ask if murder were being done. But no one moved. Even the shadows were still, frozen to the snow. Not an owl hunted; not a field mouse scuttered. The moon seemed not to budge. She was but a spot of glare ice on a sky tingling with stars.