of such an alliance.'

At this opportune moment, the cards were thrown up, and Mr Henry Gowan
came across the room saying, 'Mother, if you can spare Mr Clennam for
this time, we have a long way to go, and it's getting late.' Mr Clennam
thereupon rose, as he had no choice but to do; and Mrs Gowan showed him,
to the last, the same look and the same tapped contemptuous lips.

'You have had a portentously long audience of my mother,' said Gowan, as
the door closed upon them. 'I fervently hope she has not bored you?'

'Not at all,' said Clennam.

They had a little open phaeton for the journey, and were soon in it on
the road home. Gowan, driving, lighted a cigar; Clennam declined one. Do
what he would, he fell into such a mood of abstraction that Gowan said
again, 'I am very much afraid my mother has bored you?' To which he
roused himself to answer, 'Not at all!' and soon relapsed again.

In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his thoughtfulness
would have turned principally on the man at his side. He would have
thought of the morning when he first saw him rooting out the stones with
his heel, and would have asked himself, 'Does he jerk me out of the
path in the same careless, cruel way?' He would have thought, had this
introduction to his mother been brought about by him because he knew
what she would say, and that he could thus place his position before
a rival and loftily warn him off, without himself reposing a word of
confidence in him? He would have thought, even if there were no such
design as that, had he brought him there to play with his repressed
emotions, and torment him? The current of these meditations would have
been stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to
himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such
suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high,
unenvious course he had resolved to keep. At those times, the striving
within him would have been hardest; and looking up and catching Gowan's
eyes, he would have started as if he had done him an injury.

Then, looking at the dark road and its uncertain objects, he would have
gradually trailed off again into thinking, 'Where are we driving, he
and I, I wonder, on the darker road of life? How will it be with us, and
with her, in the obscure distance?' Thinking of her, he would have been
troubled anew with a reproachful misgiving that it was not even loyal to
her to dislike him, and that