r. Raffles, that we can hardly
enjoy each other's society. The wisest plan for both of us will
therefore be to part as soon as possible. Since you say that you
wished to meet me, you probably considered that you had some business
to transact with me. But under the circumstances I will invite you to
remain here for the night, and I will myself ride over here early
to-morrow morning--before breakfast, in fact, when I can receive any
Communication you have to make to me."

"With all my heart," said Raffles; "this is a comfortable place--a
little dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night,
with this good liquor and the prospect of seeing you again in the
morning. You're a much better host than my stepson was; but Josh owed
me a bit of a grudge for marrying his mother; and between you and me
there was never anything but kindness."

Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and
sneering in Raffles' manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had
determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words
upon him. But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the
difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be
permanently counted on with this man. It was inevitable that he should
wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be
regarded as lying outside the divine plan. The spirit of evil might
have sent him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument
of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a
chastisement of a new kind. It was an hour of anguish for him very
different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely
private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were
pardoned and his services accepted. Those misdeeds even when
committed--had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his
desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the
divine scheme? And was he after all to become a mere stone of
stumbling and a rock of offence? For who would understand the work
within him? Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting
disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had
espoused, in one heap of obloquy?

In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's mind
clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman
ends. But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's
orbit and