lf on
the brink of the red valley of war, and measured the danger and length
of it with awe. He made a detour in the glimmer and shadow of the
streets, came into the back stable lane, and watched for a long while
the light burn steady in the judge's room. The longer he gazed upon that
illuminated window-blind, the more blank became the picture of the man
who sat behind it, endlessly turning over sheets of process, pausing to
sip a glass of port, or rising and passing heavily about his book-lined
walls to verify some reference. He could not combine the brutal judge
and the industrious, dispassionate student; the connecting link escaped
him; from such a dual nature it was impossible he should predict
behaviour; and he asked himself if he had done well to plunge into a
business of which the end could not be foreseen? and presently after,
with a sickening decline of confidence, if he had done loyally to strike
his father? For he had struck him--defied him twice over and before a
cloud of witnesses--struck him a public buffet before crowds. Who had
called him to judge his father in these precarious and high questions?
The office was usurped. It might have become a stranger; in a son--there
was no blinking it--in a son, it was disloyal. And now, between these
two natures so antipathetic, so hateful to each other, there was
depending an unpardonable affront: and the providence of God alone might
foresee the manner in which it would be resented by Lord Hermiston.

These misgivings tortured him all night and arose with him in the
winter's morning; they followed him from class to class, they made him
shrinkingly sensitive to every shade of manner in his companions, they
sounded in his ears through the current voice of the professor; and he
brought them home with him at night unabated and indeed increased. The
cause of this increase lay in a chance encounter with the celebrated Dr.
Gregory. Archie stood looking vaguely in the lighted window of a
book-shop, trying to nerve himself for the approaching ordeal. My lord
and he had met and parted in the morning as they had now done for long,
with scarcely the ordinary civilities of life; and it was plain to the
son that nothing had yet reached the father's ears. Indeed, when he
recalled the awful countenance of my lord, a timid hope sprang up in him
that perhaps there would be found no one bold enough to carry tales. If
this were so, he asked himself, would he begin again? and he found n