the fault of thinking
too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all,
apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond
him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected,
self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose
righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of
whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how
immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey
Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn
self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be
of doubtful result. The point on which the swift-revolving top of his
thinking and feeling turned was as yet his present conscious self, as a
thing that was and would be, not as a thing that had to become.
Naturally the pivot had worn a socket, and such socket is sure to be a
sore. His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great
imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil
burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained
exterior.

CHAPTER V.

GODFREY AND LETTY.

Godfrey, being an Englishman, and with land of his own, could not fail
to be fond of horses. For his own use he kept two--an indulgence
disproportioned to his establishment; for, although precise in his
tastes as to equine toilet, he did not feel justified in the keeping of
a groom for their use only. Hence it came that, now and then, strap and
steel, as well as hide and hoof, would get partially neglected; and his
habits in the use of his horses being fitful--sometimes, it would be
midnight even, when he scoured from his home, seeking the comfort of
desert as well as solitary places--it is not surprising if at times,
going to the stable to saddle one, he should find its gear not in the
spick-and-span condition alone to his mind. It might then well happen
there was no one near to help him, and there be nothing for it but to
put his own hands to the work: he was too just to rouse one who might
be nowise to blame, or send a maid to fetch him from field or barn,
where he might be more importantly engaged.

One night, meaning to start for a long ride early in the morning, he
had gone to the stable to see how things were; and, soon after, it
happened that Letty, attending to some duty before going to bed, caught
sight of him cleaning his stirrups: from that moment she took upon
hers