During the dark and troubled time that followed, Morland fell away from Jimmie like the bosom friend of a mediaeval artist stricken with the Black Death. At first, common decency impelled him to send the tainted one affectionate messages, invitations to trust him awhile longer, and enlarged, with the crudity of his mental habit, on the noble aspects of Jimmie's sacrifice. But after Jimmie left the Hardacres' house, which happened as soon as he could bear the journey, Morland shrank from meeting him face to face; and when public exposure came, the messages and the invitations and the protestations ceased, and Jimmie was left in loneliness upon a pinnacle of infamy. Morland, in the futile hope of the weak-willed man that he could, by some astonishing chance, sail a middle course, did indeed give himself peculiar pains to keep the story out of the newspapers, and his ill-success was due to other causes than his own lack of effort. It was a tale too picturesque to be wasted in these days of sensation-hunger. The fact of the dénouement of the tragedy having taken place in the presence of royalty lent it a theatrical glamour. A sardonic press filled an Athenian public with what it lusted after. Indeed, who shall say with authority that the actual dramas re-enacted before our courts and reported in our newspapers have not their value in splashing with sudden colour the drab lives of thousands? May it not be better for the dulled soul to be occasionally arrested by the contemplation of furious passions than to feed contentedly like a pig beside the slaughtered body of its fellow?