ory was, after all, as he told himself, but a commonplace of life
in every civilised community. Many a man sins thus, and many a woman
suffers, and many bastards are yearly born into the world
without--perhaps unfortunately--subsequent manifestation of the divine
wrath and signal chastisement of the sinner, or of his legitimate
heirs, male or female. Affiliation orders are as well known to
magistrate's clerks, as are death-certificates of children bearing the
maiden name of their mother to those of the registrar.

All that Richard could dispose of, if with a decent deploring of the
frequency of it, yet composedly enough. But there remained that other
part of it. And this he could not dispose of so cursorily. His own
unhappy deformity, it is true, was amply accounted for on lines quite
other than the fulfilment of prophecy, offering, as it did, example of
a class of prenatal accidents which, if rare, is still admittedly
recurrent in the annals of obstetrics and embryology. Nevertheless, the
foretelling of that strange Child of Promise, whose outward aspect and
the circumstances of whose birth--as set forth in the sorry rhyme of
the chap-book--bore such startling resemblance to his own, impressed
him deeply. It astonished, it, in a sense, appalled him. For it came so
very near. It looked him so insistently in the face. It laid strong
hands on him from out the long past, claiming him, associating itself
imperatively with him, asserting, whether he would or no, the actuality
and inalienability of its relation to himself. Science might pour scorn
on that relation, exposing the absurdity of it both from the moral and
physical point of view. But sentiment held other language. And so did
that nobler morality which takes its rise in considerations spiritual
rather than social and economic, and finds the origins and ultimates,
alike, not in things seen and temporal, but in things unseen and
eternal--things which, though they tarry long for accomplishment, can
neither change, nor be denied, nor, short of accomplishment, can pass
away.

And it was this aspect of the whole, strange matter--the thought,
namely, of that same Child of Promise who, predestined to bear the last
and heaviest stroke of retributive justice, should, bearing it rightly,
bring salvation to his race--which obtained with Dickie on the fair
Sunday morning in question. It refused to quit him. It affected him
through all his being. It appealed to the poetry, the i