to be specified, he put them
away. Would it ever all come right?

He made his solitary tea, and sat down again to consider the
point. But the point would not be considered alone. He began to
feel more strongly what he had had several hints of already, that
there was a curiously close connexion between his own love story
and that of Harry Winburn and Patty--that he couldn't separate
them, even in his thoughts. Old Simon's tumble, which had
recalled his daughter from Oxford at so critical a moment for
him; Mary's visit to Englebourn at this very time; the curious
yet natural series of little accidents which had kept him in
ignorance of Patty's identity until the final catastrophe--then,
again, the way in which Harry Winburn and his mother had come
across him on the very day of his leaving Barton; the fellowship
of a common mourning which had seemed to bind them together so
closely; and this last discovery, which he could not help fearing
must turn Harry into a bitter enemy, when he heard the truth, as
he must, sooner or later--as all these things passed before him,
he gave in to a sort of superstitious feeling that his own fate
hung, in some way or another, upon that of Harry Winburn. If he
helped on his suit, he was helping on his own; but whether he
helped on his own or not, was, after all, not that which was
uppermost in his thoughts, He was much changed in this respect
since he last sat in those rooms, just after his first days with
her. Since then an angel had met him, and had touched the cord of
self, which, trembling, was passing "in music out of sight."

The thought of Harry and his trials enabled him to indulge in
some good honest indignation, for which there was no room in his
own case. That the prospects in life of such a man should be in
the power, to a great extent, of such people as Squire Wurley and
Farmer Tester; that, because he happened to be poor, he should be
turned out of the cottage where his family had lived for a
hundred years, at a week's notice, through the caprice of a
drunken gambler; that because he had stood up for his rights, and
had thereby offended the worst farmer in the parish, he should be
a marked man, and unable to get work--these things appeared so
monstrous to Tom, and made him so angry, that he was obliged to
get up and stamp about the room. And from the particular case he
very soon got to generalizations.

Questions which had before now puzzled him gained a new
significance