"Hardly that," was the reply. "I should rather say that he was non-moral. He acted without malice and without scruple or remorse. His conduct exhibited a pa.s.sionless expediency which was rather dreadful because utterly unhuman. But he was a strong man--a courageous, self-contained man, and I had been better pleased if it could have been ordained that some other hand than mine should let the axe fall."

Thornd.y.k.e's compunction may appear strange and inconsistent, but yet his feeling was also my own. Great as were the misery and suffering that this inscrutable man had brought into the lives of those I loved, I forgave him; and in his downfall forgot the callous relentlessness with which he had pursued his evil purpose. For he it was who had brought Ruth into my life; who had opened for me the Paradise of Love into which I had just entered. And so my thoughts turned away from the still shape that lay on the floor of the stately old room in Lincoln's Inn, away to the sunny vista of the future, where I should walk hand in hand with Ruth until my time, too, should come; until I, too, like the grim lawyer, should hear the solemn evening bell bidding me put out into the darkness of the silent sea.