Page:The Millbank Case - 1905 - Eldridge.djvu/42

 the two dear ones, of whom one alone is to read these lines, would be an injustice to the woman herself and to her children. To her influence, exerted against me, I attribute my failure to secure the chief justiceship. As great as was the disappointment, I can write the fact to-day without bitterness toward her and without purpose to accuse her of injustice. If by meeting the penalty of my sin, I can avert it from others, I am content.'"

Unless one knew the unbending spirit of the man in matters of right and wrong, he must fail to understand the keenness of feeling covered by the apparently cold, formal statement of fact to which Judge Parlin had confined his written words. To the witness on the witness rack, however, those words were as if the living man spoke again and laid bare a heart torn with the humiliation of self-condemnation, more terrible to him than the judgment of any human tribunal. Realising the bitterness of spirit in which he had spoken, she was stirred anew by that long-dead instinct of protection, which had made her weakness a shield in the past to his strength, and held high her head, too proud of her dead to allow