lusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan, who saw in
his brother's degrading marriage the means of gratifying at once his
jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt himself
simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth would
have chafed him less intolerably. If the curses he muttered half aloud
when he was alone had had no other object than Dunstan's diabolical
cunning, he might have shrunk less from the consequences of avowal.
But he had something else to curse--his own vicious folly, which now
seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and
vices do when their promptings have long passed away. For four years
he had thought of Nancy Lammeter, and wooed her with tacit patient
worship, as the woman who made him think of the future with joy: she
would be his wife, and would make home lovely to him, as his father's
home had never been; and it would be easy, when she was always near, to
shake off those foolish habits that were no pleasures, but only a
feverish way of annulling vacancy. Godfrey's was an essentially
domestic nature, bred up in a home where the hearth had no smiles, and
where the daily habits were not chastised by the presence of household
order. His easy disposition made him fall in unresistingly with the
family courses, but the need of some tender permanent affection, the
longing for some influence that would make the good he preferred easy
to pursue, caused the neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness of the
Lammeter household, sunned by the smile of Nancy, to seem like those
fresh bright hours of the morning when temptations go to sleep and
leave the ear open to the voice of the good angel, inviting to
industry, sobriety, and peace. And yet the hope of this paradise had
not been enough to save him from a course which shut him out of it for
ever. Instead of keeping fast hold of the strong silken rope by which
Nancy would have drawn him safe to the green banks where it was easy to
step firmly, he had let himself be dragged back into mud and slime, in
which it was useless to struggle. He had made ties for himself which
robbed him of all wholesome motive, and were a constant exasperation.

Still, there was one position worse than the present: it was the
position he would be in when the ugly secret was disclosed; and the
desire that continually triumphed over every other was that of warding
off the evil day, when he would have to