etection, on some doubt, bewilderment, or conjecture. He would ask the
farthest-off questions: who could tell what might send him into the
track of discovery? He would give to the talk the strangest turns,
laying trap after trap to ensnare the most miserable of facts, elevated
into a desirable secret only by his hope to learn through it something
equally valueless beyond it. Especially he delighted in discovering, or
flattering himself he had discovered, the hollow full of dead men's
bones under the flowery lawn of seeming goodness. Nor as yet had he, so
far as he knew, or at least was prepared to allow, ever failed. And
this he called the study of human nature, and quoted Pope. Truly, next
to God, the proper study of mankind is man; but how shall a man that
knows only the evil in himself, nor sees it hateful, read the
thousandfold-compounded heart of his neighbor? To rake over the
contents of an ash-pit, is not to study geology. There were motives in
Redmain's own being, which he was not merely incapable of
understanding, but incapable of seeing, incapable of suspecting.

The game had for him all the pleasure of keenest speculation; nor that
alone, for, in the supposed discovery of the evil of another, he felt
himself vaguely righteous.

One more point in his character I may not in fairness omit: he had
naturally a strong sense of justice; and, if he exercised it but little
in some of the relations of his life, he was none the less keenly alive
to his own claims on its score; for chiefly he cried out for fair play
on behalf of those who were wicked in similar fashion to himself. But,
in truth, no one dealt so hardly with Redmain as his own conscience at
such times when suffering and fear had awaked it.

So much for a portrait-sketch of the man to whom Mortimer had sold his
daughter--such was the man whom Hesper, entirely aware that none could
compel her to marry against her will, had, partly from fear of her
father, partly from moral laziness, partly from reverence for the
Moloch of society, whose priestess was her mother, vowed to love,
honor, and obey! In justice to her, it must be remembered, however,
that she did not and could not know of him what her father knew.

CHAPTER XXII.

MRS. REDMAIN.

In the autumn the Redmains went to Durnmelling: why they did so, I
should find it hard to say. If, when a child, Hesper loved either of
her parents, the experiences of later years had so heaped that filial
aff