“Don’t ask me too much,” he begged. “It’s an ugly story, and you’ll know it soon enough. Only, believe me, it isn’t I who am bringing it all about.”
“But you could stop it,” she expostulated.
“Nothing in the world could stop it,” he answered. “I don’t look like a superstitious man, do I, Miss Besant?”
“I shouldn’t have said so,” she admitted.
“I have this belief, though,” he went on, “which you may call superstitious, or you may not. There are some things which a man who meddles with must suffer for. I have seen it in my younger days in Egypt, and I have seen it also in China. I have seen a man who posed as a great savant and Egyptologist destroy a sacred tomb. The newspapers of the world were filled with accounts of the treasure he discovered. He died within a few months, and to this day no one knows how. And then tell me this, by what right does a young man like Gregory Ballaston, simply because he has courage and enterprise, and because he is faced with ruin, dare to come out to a strange country, break into a sacred temple and rob it? Well, he found no treasure, but for the evil which has come because of his wrong-doing, you must not blame me who point the finger to his guilt. You must blame something which neither you nor I fully understand, but which is working for a punishment just as surely.”
“But you don’t think,” she faltered, “you can’t believe, that Gregory Ballaston killed Mr. Endacott.”
“The law will have to decide that,” he answered gravely.
She sat for several moments, pensive and still. Then she rose to her feet.
“I think it is all very horrible,” she sighed.
“Life has its grim and terrible side,” he declared, “but underlying it all there is a sense of justice which has made us humans frame laws and institute a code of punishment. The instinct to do this and abide by the results is a part of nature itself. No one really escapes the consequences of ill-doing. Will you promise me one thing, Miss Besant?”