way exultant. Not too strong a word; for, independently of his wider
ambitions, he was moved and gratified by the thought that kindly
feeling towards him had sprung up in such a heart as this. Nor did
conscience so much as whisper a reproach. With unreflecting
ingenuousness he tasted the joy as if it were his right. Thus long he
had waited, through years of hungry manhood, for the look, the tone,
which were in harmony with his native sensibilities. Fanny Warricombe
was but an undeveloped girl, yet he valued her friendship above the
passionate attachment of any woman bred on a lower social plane. Had it
been possible, he would have kissed her fingers with purest reverence.

When out of sight of the house, he paused to regard the sky again. Its
noontide splendour was dazzling; masses of rosy cloud sailed swiftly
from horizon to horizon, the azure deepening about them. Yet before
long the west would again send forth its turbulent spirits, and so the
girls might perhaps be led to think of him.

By night the weather grew more tranquil. There was a full moon, and its
radiance illumined the ever-changing face of heaven with rare grandeur.
Godwin could not shut himself up over his books; he wandered far away
into the country, and let his thoughts have freedom.

He was learning to review with calmness the course by which he had
reached his now steadfast resolve. A revulsion such as he had
experienced after his first day of simulated orthodoxy, half a year
ago, could not be of lasting effect, for it was opposed to the whole
tenor of his mature thought. It spoilt his holiday, but had no chance
of persisting after his return to the atmosphere of Rotherhithe. That
he should have been capable of such emotion was, he said to himself, in
the just order of things; callousness in the first stages of an
undertaking which demanded gross hypocrisy would signify an ignoble
nature--a nature, indeed, which could never have been submitted to
trial of so strange a kind. But he had overcome himself; that phase of
difficulty was outlived, and henceforth he saw only the material
obstacles to be defied by his vindicated will.

What he proposed to himself was a life of deliberate baseness. Godwin
Peak never tried to play the sophist with this fact. But he succeeded
in justifying himself by a consideration of the circumstances which had
compelled him to a vile expedient. Had his project involved conscious
wrong to other persons, he would scarcely