Sven lay as before, thinking. And in a little while, when his mind again had given him a clear and indisputable thought, he lifted his voice and cried to his father:
"But loathing is not evil in itself. It is a warning and a safeguard. And if one could use it so, turning it to good use, one might be of great service to mankind."
The old man looked up. His rheumy gray eyes lit up for a moment, and his bowed figure straightened.
Sven sprang to his feet, and, stepping across the thwarts, sat down beside his father.
"Something has happened to me to-day," he said. "Something that has helped me. I am not unhappy now about the fire at the school. I have something else to think of."
Then he went back to his place and lay down again, listening to the heavy rush of the south wind, watching the blending colour of the reefs, and stroking his forehead with his slender, delicate hand.
[LESS THAN THE LEAST]
JULIUS MARTIN LAMPRECHT, arrested and remanded on a charge of murder, lay on the bench in his cell in the lock-up at Knapefiord, staring into the gray gloom about him.
He was telling himself, as he had done so many times since his arrest, that he was not really guilty, and that there was really no need to confess.
"Now, if I really had been," he said to himself, recollecting his own words at his examination that same morning—"if I really had been guilty of cracking in the skulls of two old people, I should never deny it for a moment. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—I know about that. And I know that justice must be done. And better to take your punishment in this world than have it to come in the next, where it lasts through all eternity."