At midnight he had to walk out under the star-sprinkled roof of the tuliptree to give his eyes repose from the sight of anguish. The night brooded above, so beautiful, so benign that he wondered how God, the indubitable God who stared down at his little world he had made, could endure the hell he had created for the punishment of his creatures. A few hours had drained RoBards’ heart of resentment against the one rival in his one love, yet it was said and preached that God kept in the center of this world an eternal vat of liquid fire where numberless children of his parentage screamed everlastingly in vain for so much as a drop of water on their foreheads. And all because six thousand years before one man Adam had broken a contract imposed upon him. Lawyer and believer in laws, RoBards could not fathom such ruthlessness, such rigor in a code of entailed sin. Humanity was growing kindlier toward its prisoners. Thirty or forty years ago, the French under the lead of Doctor Pinel had relapsed to the old Greek theory that the insane were innocent invalids, and should be treated kindly, not flogged and chained and reviled. This seemed to cast a doubt upon the belief that the mad folk were inhabited by devils, but the effects of gentleness were amazing. And recently this infection of modern weakness and effeminacy had led to a theory of softer methods toward criminals. Good and pious men had protested against the cessation of capital punishment for thieves, but theft had not been increased by mercy. In the British Navy, the flogging of sailors had been discontinued and there were sentimentalists who pleaded that American sailors also should be protected from the horror of being stripped and lashed till their bare backs bled. But this dangerous leniency had not yet been tried. Over at this Sing Sing prison, however, where Chalender was building his section of the aqueduct, so called “prison reform” was under trial, and no great harm had come of it as yet. Where three thousand lashes with the cat-o’-six tails had been the monthly total, less than three hundred were inflicted now. Women were reading the Bible to the prisoners now and then. All the good old rigidities of discipline were giving way. The world was turning slowly and painfully from the ancient faith in cruelty and in men made crueler by a most cruel God, and RoBards felt his power to hate Chalender seeping out of his heart like sand stealing from the upper chamber of an hourglass. He tried to hold it, because it seemed indecent to endure the existence of one he suspected of so much as an inclination toward his sacred wife. But it slipped away in spite of him. When he needed his hate, it was gone. Night after night he fell asleep in his chair at the bedside of his panting enemy, who moaned when he slept, but when he was awake smothered all sound and simply sweat and stared and gnawed at the quilt like a trapped rat.