"Is there no other way?" he asked himself.
He saw himself in prison, in prison clothes, in the prison cell, on the prison bed. Above all he saw another Deemster going upstairs to sit on the bench while he lay in the vaults below.
He thought of his father and his family—four hundred years of the Ballamoars and not a stain on the name of one of them until now. He thought of Fenella—the cruel shame he would bring on her. Granted he was guilty, and deserved punishment, had he any right to punish Fenella also?
The clock on the landing struck one. An owl shrieked in the plantation. He got up and strode about the room. The impulses of the natural man began to fight for safety.
"Good God, what am I thinking about?" he asked himself.
What had he done to deserve all this? He had broken a wicked law which had no right to exist, but did that require that he should denounce himself, go to prison, degrade his father's name, break Fenella's heart and put himself up on a gibbet for every passer-by to jeer at and spit upon?
"What madness! What rank madness!"
He thought of the thousands of "great" men in all ages of the world who had broken bad laws, and yet lived in honour and died in glory. Why should he suffer for doing the same thing? Why he and not the others? He laughed in scorn of his own weakness, but at the next moment a mocking voice within him seemed to say,
"Go on! Go on! Issue that warrant! Let the unhappy girl who trusted you be brought back and executed. Let the friend who loved you be arrested and tried and sent to jail for the crime you have committed. Go through all that duplicity again. Let the whole community be submerged in anarchy as the consequence of your sin. But remember, when you come out of it all, you will be a devil, and your soul will be damned."
That terrified him and he sat down by the empty hearth once more. After a while he found his hands wet under his face. He heard a soft, caressing voice pleading with him,