in Bruce, and so make him fit for salvation; but who, Thomas
believed, would not do so--at all events, _might_ not do so--keeping
him alive for ever in howling unbelief instead.

Scarcely any of the "members" henceforth saluted Bruce in the street.
None of them traded with him, except two or three who owed him a few
shillings, and could not pay him. And the modifying effect upon the
week's returns was very perceptible. This was the only form in which a
recognizable vengeance could have reached him. To escape from it, he
had serious thoughts of leaving the place, and setting up in some
remote village.

CHAPTER LXXXVI.

Notwithstanding Alec's diligence and the genial companionship of Mr
Cupples--whether the death of Kate, or his own illness, or the reaction
of shame after his sojourn in the tents of wickedness, had opened dark
visions of the world of reality lying in awful _unknownness_ around the
life he seemed to know, I cannot tell,--cold isolations would suddenly
seize upon him, wherein he would ask himself--that oracular cave in
which one hears a thousand questions before one reply--"What is the use
of it all--this study and labour?" And he interpreted the silence to
mean: "Life is worthless. There is no glow in it--only a glimmer and
shine at best."--Will my readers set this condition down as one of
disease? If they do, I ask, "Why should a man be satisfied with
anything such as was now within the grasp of Alec Forbes?" And if they
reply that a higher ambition would have set him at peace if not at
rest, I only say that they would be nearer health if they had his
disease. Pain is not malady; it is the revelation of malady--the
meeting and recoil between the unknown death and the unknown life; that
jar of the system whereby the fact becomes known to the man that he is
ill. There was disease in Alec, but the disease did not lie in his
dissatisfaction. It lay in that poverty of life with which those are
satisfied who call such discontent disease. Such disease is the first
flicker of the aurora of a rising health.

This state of feeling, however, was only occasional; and a reviving
interest in anything belonging to his studies, or a merry talk with Mr
Cupples, would dispel it for a time, just as a breath of fine air will
give the sense of perfect health to one dying of consumption.

But what made these questionings develope into the thorns of a more
definite self-condemnation--the advanced guard sometime