e than himself. The
influence of a wife that had no sympathy with plain, common people who
wore the wrong clothes, and said the wrong things, and desired to be
guided in their ridiculous, trivial affairs, had more to do with his
failure than he knew.

He was always drawn between two desires, the one to be a great and
beloved divine, the other to be a country gentleman, living in
refinement, and in surroundings sympathetic to his emotional artistic
temperament. The early promise of his youth, unfulfilled in his middle
age, had disappointed him. But there was always one consolation. His son
would endure no privation and limitation such as hampered a man without
private means, like himself. As the heir to Herresford's great wealth,
Dick's future prospects had seemed to be assured. But the lad himself,
careless of his own interests, like his father, ran wild at an awkward
period when his grandfather, breaking in mind and body, developed those
eccentricities which became the marked feature of his latter days. The
animosity of the old man was aroused, and once an enemy was always an
enemy with him. He cared nothing for his daughter. Indeed, he cherished a
positive hatred of her at times; and never lost an opportunity of
humiliating the rector and making him feel that he gained nothing by
marrying the daughter against her father's wishes.

It was bad enough to have troubles coming upon him in battalions without
this final blow--the charge of forgery against Dick.

The wife, unable to rest, arose and paced the house in the small hours.
She dreaded to ask for further particulars of the charge brought by the
bank against poor Dick, for fear she should be tempted to confess to her
husband that she had robbed her own father. The horrible truth stood out
now in its full light, naked and terrifying. With any other father, there
might have been a chance of mercy. But there was none with this one. The
malevolent old miser's nature had ever been at war with her own. From her
birth, he had taunted her with being like her mother--a shallow,
worthless, social creature, incapable of straight dealing and plain
economy. From her childhood, she had deceived him, even in the matter of
pennies. She had lied to him when she left home to elope with John
Swinton; and it was only by threatening him with lawyers and a public
scandal that she had been able to make him disgorge a part of the income
derived from her dead mother's fortune, which had be