He was a soldier and took service and discipline in earnest.

What he had done he had been forced to do; but no one could guess how hard it had been to him to fulfil this terrible duty.

His own act was abominable in his eyes, and yet he would have done it again to-morrow, if it had again been required of him under similar circumstances.

He bewailed the beautiful statue as a lost treasure of art; but he felt that it was indispensable that it should perish out of the world.

And at the same time he thought of Gorgo, wondering how she--who had only the day before pledged herself to him, whom he loved with fervent passion, to whom, as he well knew, his faith was something monstrous in its contempt for beauty--would bear to learn that he, her lover, was the man who, like some coarse barbarian, had defaced this noble work and ruined this vision of beauty, no less dear to him than it was to her.