"I wasn't going to speak of him," said Chatworth quickly.
"I know," she answered, "but do you mind my speaking of him?" They had sat down on the broad lip of the fountain basin. He was looking at her intently. "It is strange," she said, "but in spite of his doing this terrible thing I can't feel that he himself is terrible—like Clara."
"And yet," he answered in a grave voice, "I would rather you did."
She turned a troubled face. "Ah, have you forgotten what you said the first night I met you? You said it doesn't matter what a man is, even if he's a thief, as long as he's a good one."
At this he laughed a little grudgingly. "Oh, I don't go back on that, but I was looking through the great impartial eye of the universe. Whereas a man may be good of his kind, he's only good in his kind. Tip out a cat among canaries and see what happens. My dear girl, we were the veriest birds in his paws! And notice that it isn't moral law—it's instinct. We recognize by scent before we see the shape. You never knew him. You never could. And you never trusted him."
"But," she interrupted eagerly, "I would have done anything for you when I thought you were a thief."
"Anything?" he caught her up with laughter. "Oh, yes, anything to haul me over the dead line on to your side. That was the very point you made. That was where you would have dropped me—if I had stuck by my kind, as you thought it, and not come over to yours."
She saw herself fairly caught. She heard her mental process stated to perfection.
"But if you hadn't felt all along I was your kind, if you hadn't had an idea that I was a stray from the original fold, you would never have wanted to go in for me," he explained it.
Flora had her doubts about the truth of this. For a time she had been certain of his belonging to the lawless other fold, and at times she would have gone with him in spite of it, but this last knowledge she withheld. She withheld it because she could make out now, that, for all his seeming wildness, he had no lawless instincts in himself. Generations of great doing and great mixing among men had created him, a creature perfectly natural and therefore eccentric; but the same generations had handed down from father to son the law-abiding instinct of the rulers of the people. He could be careless of the law. He was strong in it. In his own mind he and the law were one. His perception of the relations of life was so complete that he had no further use for the written law; and Farrell Wand's was so limited that he had never found the use for it. Lawless both; but—the two extremes. They might seem to meet—but between those two extremes, between a Chatworth and a Farrell Wand—why, there was all the world's experience between!