leman. Holding intercourse
with him is out of the question. No wonder Government declines to
advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your name. He bears
mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice in the settlement
of his career. And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval of a
young man is the best certificate for his general chances in life. I
know of a City of London merchant of some sort, and I know a firm of
lawyers, who will have none but University men at their office; at
least, they have the preference."

"Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the University nor the
drawing-room," said Vernon; "equal to fighting and dying for you, and
that's all."

Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, "The lad is a favourite
of mine."

His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step into the garden,
leaving Clara behind him. "My love!" said he, in apology, as he turned
to her. She could not look stern, but she had a look without a dimple
to soften it, and her eyes shone. For she had wagered in her heart that
the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay would expose the Egoist. And
there were other motives, wrapped up and intertwisted, unrecognizable,
sufficient to strike her with worse than the flush of her
self-knowledge of wickedness when she detained him to speak of Crossjay
before Vernon.

At last it had been seen that she was conscious of suffering in her
association with this Egoist! Vernon stood for the world taken into her
confidence. The world, then, would not think so ill of her, she thought
hopefully, at the same time that she thought most evilly of herself.
But self-accusations were for the day of reckoning; she would and must
have the world with her, or the belief that it was coming to her, in
the terrible struggle she foresaw within her horizon of self, now her
utter boundary. She needed it for the inevitable conflict. Little
sacrifices of her honesty might be made. Considering how weak she was,
how solitary, how dismally entangled, daily disgraced beyond the power
of any veiling to conceal from her fiery sensations, a little hypocrisy
was a poor girl's natural weapon. She crushed her conscientious mind
with the assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not entirely unaware
that she was thereby preparing it for a convenient blindness in the
presence of dread alternatives; but the pride of laying such stress on
small sins gave her purity a blush of pleasure and overcam