Be that as it may. The press paid no heed to Morland or the smart fellows of solicitors whom he employed. It published as many details as it could discover or invent. For the tragical business did not end with the scene on the Hardacres' lawn. There was an inquest on the dead girl. There was the trial of Daniel Stone for attempted murder. The full glare of publicity shed itself upon the sordid history. In the one case the jury gave a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity; in the other the prisoner was found to be insane and was sent to an asylum. These were matters of no great public interest. But letters to the dead girl in a disguised handwriting were discovered, and Stone gave his crazy evidence, and a story of heartless seduction under solemn promise of marriage and of abandonment with cynical offer of money was established, and the fashionable portrait-painter, who was supposed to be the hero of the tale, awoke one morning and found himself infamous. The thing, instead of remaining a mere police-court commonplace, became a society scandal. Exaggeration was inevitable, not only of facts but of the reprobation a virtuous community pronounces on the specially pilloried wrongdoer. The scapegoat in its essential significance is by no means a thing of legendary history. It exists still, and owes its existence to an ineradicable instinct in human nature. The reprobation aforesaid is due not entirely to hypocrisy, as the social satirist would have it, but in a great measure to an unreasoning impulse towards expiation of offences by horrified condemnation of some notorious other. Thus it came to pass that upon Jimmie's head were put all the iniquities of the people and all their transgressions in all their sins, and he was led away into the social wilderness. After that, the world forgot him. He had been obscure enough before he burst for a day into the blaze of royal patronage; but now blackest darkness swallowed him up. Only Aline remained by his side.
Morland wrote to Jimmie once after the exposure. As he had been the cause, said he, of the probable ruin of Jimmie's professional prospects, it was only right that he should endeavour to make some compensation. It was, besides, a privilege of their life-long friendship. He enclosed a cheque for two thousand pounds. Jimmie returned it.