waiting in the library, with
set face and clenched hands, pacing up and down like a caged beast. The
increased whiteness of his hair and the extreme pallor of his skin gave
to his sorrow-shadowed eyes an extraordinary brilliancy. His lips moved
incessantly as thoughts, surging in his brain, demanded physical
utterance. At intervals, he would wring his hands and look upward
appealingly, like a man struggling in the toils of a temptation too great
to be mastered. A long period of worry and embarrassment had broken his
spirit. He was fated with the first real calamity that had ever overtaken
him. With money difficulties, he was familiar. They scarcely touched his
conscience. But, in this matter of his son's honor, the divergent roads
of right and wrong were clearly defined; unhappily, he was not strong
enough fearlessly to tread the path of virtue.

His wife's arguments seemed unanswerable. Indeed, whenever she was near,
he hopelessly surrendered himself to her guidance. He knew perfectly well
that the only proper course for a man of God was to go forth into the
market-place and proclaim his son's innocence, to the shame of his wife,
of himself, and of his daughter. It was not a question of precise
justice. It was a plain issue between God and the devil. But Mary had
pursued the policy of throwing dust in his eyes, and led him blindly
along the road where he was bound to sink deeper and deeper into the
mire.

When the love of wife conflicts with the love of child, a father is
between the horns of a dilemma. The woman was living; the boy dead. The
arguments were overpoweringly plausible. Mrs. Swinton had her life to
live through; whereas Dick's trials were ended. And would a suspicious
world believe he shared his wife's plunder without knowing how it was
obtained? In addition, Netty's future would certainly be overshadowed to
a cruel extent.

The arguments of the woman were, indeed, unanswerable: the misery of it
was that the whole thing resolved itself into a simple question of right
and wrong. As a clergyman of the church he could not countenance a lie,
live a lie, and stand idly by while Herresford compelled the bank to
refund the money stolen from them by his wife.

He had naturally argued the matter out with her, in love, in anger, in
piteous appeal. It always came around to the same thing in the end--a
compromise. The seven thousand dollars must be paid to the miser, if it
took the rest of their lives to raise it