'Oh, what does my wish matter?' she cried. 'I am asking you what is possible. I know little more than I tell you. He is here, worn-out, miserable, ruined, and the men watching to take him. I don't know how it has happened, why he came, or how they found it out; but so it is. They are there now in front of the house. How am I to get him out?'
'Is that the only question?' Stephen asked.
She looked at him with an impatience she could not restrain.
'What other question can there be, Mr Haldane? In a few minutes they will be back.'
'But there is another question,' he said. 'I believe this man has been our ruin—yours and mine—yours, Mrs Drummond, more fatally than mine. Golden was but one of his instruments, I believe—as guilty, but not more so. He has ruined us, and more than us——'
She wrung her hands in her impatience.
'Mr Haldane, I hear steps. We may but have a moment more.'
He put his hand upon her arm.
'Think!' he cried. 'Are we to let him go—to save him that he may ruin others? Is it just? Think what he has made us all suffer. Is there to be no punishment for him?'
'Oh, punishment!' she cried. 'Do you know what punishment means, when you make yourself the instrument of it? It means revenge; and there is nothing so bitter, nothing so terrible, as to see your own handiwork, and to think, "It was not God that did this; it was me."'