“With him goes, perhaps for ever, too, the chance of saying, ‘I am not your enemy.’”

“Pshaw! Parson's talk, Anthony.”

“No, Sergius, other men forgive besides parsons; and other men, and parsons too, pass by their chances of forgiving.”

“You're a whole Englishman, I'm only half an Englishman. There's something untamed in my blood, and I say—damn forgiveness!”

“And yet you've forgiven.”

“Whom?”

“Olga Mayne.”

The face of Sergius did not change at the sound of this name, unless, perhaps, to a more fixed calm, a more still and pale coldness.

“Olga is punished,” he said. “She is ruined.”