Then it comes to this--was the act murder?
The English law of murder is not perfect, but it appears to me to be substantially just, and guided by it--" "You talk as if there were no such things as mercy and pity in the world," she interrupted wildly; "as if law were not made and administered by men of just the same stuff and fabric as the lawbreaker!" He looked troubled.
"Ah, but _law_ is something beyond laws or those who administer them," he said in a lower tone; "and the law--the _obligation-sense_--of our own race and time, however imperfect it may be, is sacred, not because it has been imposed upon us from without, but because it has grown up to what it is, out of our own best life--ours, yet not ours--the best proof we have, when we look back at it in the large, when we feel its work in ourselves of some diviner power than our own will--our best clue to what that power may be!" He spoke at first, looking away--wrestling out his thought, as it were, by himself--then turning back to her, his eyes emphasised the appeal implied, though not expressed, in what he said--intense appeal to her for sympathy, forbearance, mutual respect, through all acuteness of difference.

His look both promised and implored.
He bad spoken to her but very rarely or indirectly as yet of his own religious or philosophical beliefs.

She was in a stage when such things interested her but little, and reticence in personal matters was so much the law of his life that even to her expansion was difficult.

So that--inevitably--she was arrested, for the moment, as any quick perception must be, by the things that unveil character.
Then an upheaval of indignant feeling swept the impression away.

All that he said might be ideally, profoundly true--_but_--the red blood of the common life was lacking in every word of it! He ought to be incapable of saying it _now_.