"Don't let your part in my case worry you. The game of life has gone against me. That is all. The dice were loaded before I ever got hold of them. I did what I could to out-live—out-fight my awful—inheritance. I wasn't strong enough. It got the best of me. Nature is a terrible antagonist. Perhaps now that I understand myself better I shall be able to keep a firmer hold. You did your duty, Mathews; good-by. Be— Can't you be a little kind to mother? She suffers so. Her punishment is double—and her crime was ignorance!"
This time he took the hand that was held out to him.
"Only ignorance," he added. "It seems an awful punishment for that."
"Ignorance—and poverty and love," said the young prosecutor as the door closed behind him, "and Nature did the rest! What a grip is at our throats! And how we help blind Nature in her cruel work by laws and customs and conditions! What a little way we've come from barbarism yet! How slow we travel. But we are moving," he added with a deep sigh. "Moving a little. There is light ahead. If not for us, then for those who come after."
He heard the bolt slip behind him and shuddered.
"It might as easily have been I," he mused as he went down the steps, and shuddered again.
"I doubt if it was fault of his or virtue of mine that determined which of us two should be the prosecutor."
A RUSTY LINK IN THE CHAIN.
"In the brainy that wondrous world with one inhabitant, there are recesses dim and dark, treacherous sands and dangerous shores, where seeming sirens tempt and fade; streams that rise in unknown lands from hidden springs, strange seas with ebb and flow of tides, resistless billows urged by storms of flame, profound and awful depths hidden by mist of dreams, obscure and phantom realms where vague and fearful things are half revealed, jungles where passion's tigers crouch, and skies of cloud and hue where fancies fly with painted wings that dazzle and mislead; and the poor sovereign of this pictured world is led by old desires and ancient hates, and stained by crimes of many vanished years, and pushed by hands that long ago were dust, until he feels like some bewildered slave that Mockery has throned and crowned."