establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you live
and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig's head to
the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,--a common country
squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have mixed
ours--and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him--when you in
your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry Richmond.'

The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to
utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy about
to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a
delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some moments
of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly and gazed
down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his eyes along
the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee and swaddled the
boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a business-like way, he
settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across gravel-walk and lawn,
like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the whip has been applied.

The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there a
light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt
fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of February.
So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and
fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy's terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been
out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs were
not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began, he
heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman's voice that he
knew to be his aunt Dorothy's. It came after him only once: 'Harry
Richmond'; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the
hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward
London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and nodded
a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one another; and
his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy sugarplums,
notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to prognosticate hopefully
of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to command he had given his
father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder, ceasing to know that
he was a wandering infant: and, if I remember rightly,