ly
unanimously against him. There is no use in asking why; but so it was, and
I think it would have been easier for him with his unaided strength to
uproot the Peak than to change the convictions of the Derbyshire gentlemen.
They were all against him. Of course there were predisposing causes. Your
uncle published a very bitter attack upon them, describing himself as the
victim of a political conspiracy: and I recollect he mentioned that from
the hour of the shocking catastrophe in his house, he had forsworn the turf
and all pursuits and amusements connected with it. People sneered, and said
he might as well go as wait to be kicked out.'

'Were there law-suits about all this?' I asked.

'Everybody expected that there would, for there were very savage things
printed on both sides, and I think, too, that the persons who thought worst
of him expected that evidence would yet turn up to convict Silas of the
crime they chose to impute; and so years have glided away, and many of the
people who remembered the tragedy of Bartram-Haugh, and took the strongest
part in the denunciation, and ostracism that followed, are dead, and no new
light had been thrown upon the occurrence, and your uncle Silas remains an
outcast. At first he was quite wild with rage, and would have fought the
whole county, man by man, if they would have met him. But he had since
changed his habits and, as he says, his aspirations altogether.'

'He has become religious.'

'The only occupation remaining to him. He owes money; he is poor; he is
isolated; and he says, sick and religious. Your poor father, who was
very decided and inflexible, never helped him beyond the limit he had
prescribed, after Silas's _mesalliance_. He wanted to get him into
Parliament, and would have paid his expenses, and made him an allowance;
but either Silas had grown lazy, or he understood his position better than
poor Austin, or he distrusted his powers, or possibly he really is in
ill-health; but he objected his religious scruples. Your poor papa thought
self-assertion possible, where an injured man has right to rely upon, but
he had been very long out of the world, and the theory won't do. Nothing is
harder than to get a person who has once been effectually slurred, received
again. Silas, I think, was right. I don't think it was practicable.

'Dear child, how late it is!' exclaimed Lady Knollys suddenly, looking at
the Louis Quatorze clock, that crowned the mantelpiece.

It was