might be possible he would bear his own load till that and the memory
of his last folly might be hidden together in the grave.

But he knew that he was no longer fit for a man's work, and that
it would be well that he should abandon it. He had made a terrible
mistake. In his old age he had gambled for a large stake, and had
lost it all. He had ventured to love;--to increase the small number
of those who were nearest and dearest to him, to add one to those
whom he regarded as best and purest,--and he had been terribly
deceived. He had for many years almost worshipped the one lady who
had sat at his table, and now in his old age he had asked her to
share her place of honour with another. What that other was need not
now be told. And the world knew that this woman was to have been his
wife! He had boasted loudly that he would give her that place and
those rights. He had ventured his all upon her innocence and her
purity. He had ventured his all,--and he had lost.

I do not say that on this account there was any need that he should
be stricken to the ground,--that it behoved him as a man of high
feeling to be broken-hearted. He would have been a greater man had
he possessed the power to bear up against all this, and to go forth
to the world bearing his burden bravely on his shoulders. But Sir
Peregrine Orme was not a great man, and possessed few or none of the
elements of greatness. He was a man of a singularly pure mind, and
endowed with a strong feeling of chivalry. It had been everything to
him to be spoken of by the world as a man free from reproach,--who
had lived with clean hands and with clean people around him. All
manner of delinquencies he could forgive in his dependents which did
not tell of absolute baseness; but it would have half killed him had
he ever learned that those he loved had become false or fraudulent.
When his grandson had come to trouble about the rats, he had acted,
not over-cleverly, a certain amount of paternal anger; but had
Peregrine broken his promise to him, no acting would have been
necessary. It may therefore be imagined what were now his feelings as
to Lady Mason.

Her he could forgive for deceiving him. He had told his
daughter-in-law that he would forgive her; and it was a thing done.
But he could not forgive himself in that he had been deceived. He
could not forgive himself for having mingled with the sweet current
of his Edith's life the foul waters of that criminal tragedy. He
c