equest that before any one delivers his
opinion on this point I may be permitted to speak on a question of
public feeling, which not only by myself, but by many gentlemen
present, is regarded as preliminary."

Mr. Hawley's mode of speech, even when public decorum repressed his
"awful language," was formidable in its curtness and self-possession.
Mr. Thesiger sanctioned the request, Mr. Bulstrode sat down, and Mr.
Hawley continued.

"In what I have to say, Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking simply on my
own behalf: I am speaking with the concurrence and at the express
request of no fewer than eight of my fellow-townsmen, who are
immediately around us. It is our united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode
should be called upon--and I do now call upon him--to resign public
positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer, but as a gentleman
among gentlemen. There are practices and there are acts which, owing
to circumstances, the law cannot visit, though they may be worse than
many things which are legally punishable. Honest men and gentlemen, if
they don't want the company of people who perpetrate such acts, have
got to defend themselves as they best can, and that is what I and the
friends whom I may call my clients in this affair are determined to do.
I don't say that Mr. Bulstrode has been guilty of shameful acts, but I
call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous
statements made against him by a man now dead, and who died in his
house--the statement that he was for many years engaged in nefarious
practices, and that he won his fortune by dishonest procedures--or else
to withdraw from positions which could only have been allowed him as a
gentleman among gentlemen."

All eyes in the room were turned on Mr. Bulstrode, who, since the first
mention of his name, had been going through a crisis of feeling almost
too violent for his delicate frame to support. Lydgate, who himself
was undergoing a shock as from the terrible practical interpretation of
some faint augury, felt, nevertheless, that his own movement of
resentful hatred was checked by that instinct of the Healer which
thinks first of bringing rescue or relief to the sufferer, when he
looked at the shrunken misery of Bulstrode's livid face.

The quick vision that his life was after all a failure, that he was a
dishonored man, and must quail before the glance of those towards whom
he had habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover--that God had
di