Once I also believed that a stern, uncompromising attitude toward error was what God required of an upright heart." "Error! D-do you admit that ?" stammered Berkley.

"Are you awake at last to the deviltry that stirred you--the damnable, misguided, distorted conscience that twisted you into a murderer of souls?
By God, _are_ you alive to what you did to--_her_ ?" Colonel Arran, upright in his saddle and white as death, rode straight on in front of him..

Beside him, knee to knee, rode Berkley, his features like marble, his eyes ablaze.
"I am not speaking for myself," he said between his teeth, "I am not reproaching you, cursing you, for what you have done to me--for the ruin you have made of life for me, excommunicating me from every hope, outlawing me, branding me! I am thinking, now, only of my mother.

God!--to think--to _think_ of it--of her----" Arran turned on him a face so ghastly that the boy was silenced.
Then the older man said: "Do you not know that the hell men make for others is what they are destined to burn in sooner or later?
Do you think you can tell me anything of eternal punishment ?" He laughed a harsh, mirthless laugh.

"Do you not think I have learned by this time that vengeance is God's--and that He never takes it?
It is man alone who takes it, and suffers it.