Of what avail were Columbine's high sense of duty, Moore's fine manhood, the many victories they had won over the headlong and imperious desires of love?
What avail were Wade's good offices, his spiritual teaching, his eternal hope in the order of circumstances working out to good?
These beautiful characteristics of virtue were not so strong as the unchangeable passion of old Belllounds and the vicious depravity of his son.

Wade could not imagine himself a god, proving that the wages of sin was death.

Yet in his life he had often been an impassive destiny, meting out terrible consequences.

Here he was incalculably involved.

This was the cumulative end of years of mounting plots, tangled and woven into the web of his pain and his remorse and his ideal.