y set purpose of involving
Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by
violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis,
that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this
darker aspect, Jaffrey's previous steps had already pledged him to
those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances,
that, at Clifford's trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to
swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive
explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and
witnessed.

Thus Jaffrey Pyncheon's inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was,
indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive
commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a
sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent
respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade
out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge
Pyncheon's long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it
aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and
seldom thought of it again.

We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at
the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving
to add more wealth to his only child's inheritance. Hardly a week
after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of
the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of
embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became
rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through
her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatism,--the wild
reformer,--Holgrave!

It was now far too late in Clifford's life for the good opinion of
society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication.
What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even
the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been
won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had
fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable
resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he
might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he
had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it,
which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long
after the agony had done its utmo