away with beating against the bars.

"I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with
the bars which he was to know so well--the bars of the prison that he
had made with his own hands.

He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He
stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window
at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has
met his eye every morning of his life and finds it--gone. It was
incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the
abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently
to a stand-still.

_His mother!_

His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own
hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned, and thrust the thought from
him. It was too sharp. He could not suffer it.

His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He
had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was
out of all proportion to his offence. And, like some malignant
infectious disease, retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on
those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust,
unjust, unjust!

A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any
one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against
Lady Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted