“ … With evidence of motive, gentlemen, we are not primarily concerned when there is so much suggestive evidence as to fact … but … you will probably conjecture the purpose for which he brought her from Sandmouth to Calderbury, and you will form your own opinion as to the validity of the pretext of engaging her as his young son’s governess. It may well be that you will feel that no more unsuitable person could have been chosen to look after a nine-year-old child — and a very nervous and highly strung child, we have been told — than a young woman whose temperament was such that she had only recently attempted suicide, who had had no kind of previous experience as a child’s governess, and who, in addition, could barely make herself understood in the child’s language … You will have to ask yourselves, plainly and straightforwardly, what lay behind this extraordinary incident — doubtless it can be made to look attractive if you think of it in terms of rescue and benevolence, but if you will bear in mind the culmination to which it led, and which is the sole cause of our being here to-day to pass judgment, then you will form your own opinion why the prisoner chose to install this young woman in the very centre of his house-hold, where he could see her every day and as often and for as long periods as he liked, and where, under the same roof as his wife and son … Gentlemen, it is, of course, for you to decide and interpret these matters so far as you feel justified in doing so — I only desire to caution you against the pseudo or false romanticism of which plays and novels are such frequent exponents — the kind, I mean, that deal with what I believe is called the ‘eternal triangle.’ Such fair words are, in a measure, hypocritical; they may lull us for an evening’s entertainment, but in a court of law it is our duty to remember — and it is my duty to point out — the plainer and less agreeable facts … lust — infatuation … the lowest and basest physicality, uncontrolled, dominating … all of which, gentlemen, is apt, in our modern world, as you know, to be loosely summed up under the word ‘love.’ You may call it ‘love’ if you like, provided you realize …”

And at that the whole mumbling greyness seemed to be lit by a stabbing trumpeting light; and the little doctor said in his heart, almost as if he were taking advantage of permission just given him: “Yes, I call it love.” … It was so wrong, absurd, preposterous, all that the judge had said; and yet, just round the corner from the nonsense, there was this imperishable pearl of truth. “I call it love. Oh God, yes. I call it love.”

Looking back as he tried to sleep during those last nights in Calderbury Jail, the little doctor sighed only because that moment had happened so late. And thence, inevitably, he turned to thinking of love that had always been in his heart, and in the hearts of so many: love of mankind that had sheltered long in the monk’s cell and the artist’s studio and the doctor’s laboratory; love that had made men quietly build and sacrifice and die; love that might have conquered the world had not its moment arrived too late.