held the story of Wildfire's loss till the
next morning, that it might serve him as an introduction to heavier
matter. The old Squire was accustomed to his son's frequent absence
from home, and thought neither Dunstan's nor Wildfire's non-appearance
a matter calling for remark. Godfrey said to himself again and again,
that if he let slip this one opportunity of confession, he might never
have another; the revelation might be made even in a more odious way
than by Dunstan's malignity: _she_ might come as she had threatened to
do. And then he tried to make the scene easier to himself by
rehearsal: he made up his mind how he would pass from the admission of
his weakness in letting Dunstan have the money to the fact that Dunstan
had a hold on him which he had been unable to shake off, and how he
would work up his father to expect something very bad before he told
him the fact. The old Squire was an implacable man: he made
resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them
after his anger had subsided--as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden
into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to
grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him
with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity
and became unrelentingly hard. This was his system with his tenants:
he allowed them to get into arrears, neglect their fences, reduce their
stock, sell their straw, and otherwise go the wrong way,--and then,
when he became short of money in consequence of this indulgence, he
took the hardest measures and would listen to no appeal. Godfrey knew
all this, and felt it with the greater force because he had constantly
suffered annoyance from witnessing his father's sudden fits of
unrelentingness, for which his own habitual irresolution deprived him
of all sympathy. (He was not critical on the faulty indulgence which
preceded these fits; _that_ seemed to him natural enough.) Still there
was just the chance, Godfrey thought, that his father's pride might see
this marriage in a light that would induce him to hush it up, rather
than turn his son out and make the family the talk of the country for
ten miles round.

This was the view of the case that Godfrey managed to keep before him
pretty closely till midnight, and he went to sleep thinking that he had
done with inward debating. But when he awoke in the still morning
darkness he found it impossible to reawaken