Explore "The Scales of Justice" by Fred M. White on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
With a glow at his heart, and a tightening of his pulses to which he had long been a stranger, George crept silently down the stairs. After all, it was no pleasant and conventional thing that he was doing. As an officer holding His Majesty's commission his duty was plain. He should have put personal feelings aside, roused the household, and handed the convict over to the authorities. In the eyes of the law his present action was a misdemeanour.
But what man would have done the right thing in the circumstances? In the first place, George was smarting under the lash of a false accusation. He felt reckless and desperate. He knew that Gilbert Doyle was the victim of a similar misfortune. Anyone who really knew Doyle would deem him incapable of crime. He was the victim of a scoundrel who had deliberately planned his ruin so as to get a beautiful girl and her fortune in his grasp. That scoundrel was Bernard Beard. And Beard, though he might have set out with the sole intention of making himself master of Winifred Cawdor's fortune, undoubtedly had come to love the girl.