had guided his tongue, constrained
his features? His conscious self had had no part in all this comedy;
now for the first time was he taking count of the character he had
played.

Had he been told this morning that--Why, what monstrous folly was all
this? Into what unspeakable baseness had he fallen? Happily, he had but
to take leave of the Warricombe household, and rush into some region
where he was unknown. Years hence, he would relate the story to
Earwaker.

For a long time he suffered the torments of this awakening. Shame
buffeted him on the right cheek and the left; he looked about like one
who slinks from merited chastisement. Oh, thrice ignoble varlet! To
pose with unctuous hypocrisy before people who had welcomed him under
their roof, unquestioned, with all the grace and kindliness of English
hospitality! To lie shamelessly in the face of his old fellow-student,
who had been so genuinely glad to meet him again!

Yet such possibility had not been unforeseen. At the times of his
profound gloom, when solitude and desire crushed his spirit, he had
wished that fate would afford him such an opportunity of knavish
success. His imagination had played with the idea that a man like
himself might well be driven to this expedient, and might even use it
with life-long result. Of a certainty, the Church numbered such men
among her priests,--not mere lukewarm sceptics who made religion a
source of income, nor yet those who had honestly entered the portal and
by necessity were held from withdrawing, though their convictions had
changed; but deliberate schemers from the first, ambitious but hungry
natures, keen-sighted, unscrupulous. And they were at no loss to defend
themselves against the attack of conscience. Life is a terrific
struggle for all who begin it with no endowments save their brains. A
hypocrite was not necessarily a harm-doer; easy to picture the
unbelieving priest whose influence was vastly for good, in word and
deed.

But he, he who had ever prided himself on his truth-fronting intellect,
and had freely uttered his scorn of the credulous mob! He who was his
own criterion of moral right and wrong! No wonder he felt like a
whipped cur. It was the ancestral vice in his blood, brought out by
over-tempting circumstance. The long line of base-born predecessors,
the grovelling hinds and mechanics of his genealogy, were responsible
for this. Oh for a name wherewith honour was hereditary!

His eyes were blinded by