red, something from which my father abstained and in
which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and more as
he grew richer and richer. The only thing that answered this description
was hard work, and as I never met a sane man willing to pay another for
idling, I began to see that these prodigious payments to my father were
extorted by force. To do him justice, he never boasted of abstinence.
He considered himself a hard-worked man, and claimed his fortune as the
reward of his risks, his calculations, his anxieties, and the journeys
he had to make at all seasons and at all hours. This comforted me
somewhat until it occurred to me that if he had lived a century earlier,
invested his money in a horse and a pair of pistols, and taken to the
road, his object--that of wresting from others the fruits of their labor
without rendering them an equivalent--would have been exactly the
same, and his risk far greater, for it would have included risk of
the gallows. Constant travelling with the constable at his heels, and
calculations of the chances of robbing the Dover mail, would have given
him his fill of activity and anxiety. On the whole, if Jesse Trefusis,
M.P., who died a millionaire in his palace at Kensington, had been a
highwayman, I could not more heartily loathe the social arrangements
that rendered such a career as his not only possible, but eminently
creditable to himself in the eyes of his fellows. Most men make it their
business to imitate him, hoping to become rich and idle on the same
terms. Therefore I turn my back on them. I cannot sit at their feasts
knowing how much they cost in human misery, and seeing how little they
produce of human happiness. What is your opinion, my treasure?"

Henrietta seemed a little troubled. She smiled faintly, and said
caressingly, "It was not your fault, Sidney. _I_ don't blame you."

"Immortal powers!" he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and appealing to
the skies, "here is a woman who believes that the only concern all
this causes me is whether she thinks any the worse of me personally on
account of it!"

"No, no, Sidney. It is not I alone. Nobody thinks the worse of you for
it."

"Quite so," he returned, in a polite frenzy. "Nobody sees any harm in
it. That is precisely the mischief of it."

"Besides," she urged, "your mother belonged to one of the oldest
families in England."

"And what more can man desire than wealth with descent from a county
family! Coul