ay excursions, he had
lighted on the rare samples exhibited this contrast of the quiet evening
with the sordid day humanized Mr. Goren to him. He began to see a spirit
in the rigid tradesman not so utterly dissimilar to his own, and he
fancied that he, too, had a taste for ferns. Round Beckley how they
abounded!

He told Mr. Goren so, and Mr. Goren said:

'Some day we'll jog down there together, as the saying goes.'

Mr. Goren spoke of it as an ordinary event, likely to happen in the
days to come: not as an incident the mere mention of which, as being
probable, stopped the breath and made the pulses leap.

For now Evan's education taught him to feel that he was at his lowest
degree. Never now could Rose stoop to him. He carried the shop on his
back. She saw the brand of it on his forehead. Well! and what was Rose
to him, beyond a blissful memory, a star that he had once touched?
Self-love kept him strong by day, but in the darkness of night came his
misery; wakening from tender dreams, he would find his heart sinking
under a horrible pressure, and then the fair fresh face of Rose swam
over him; the hours of Beckley were revived; with intolerable anguish he
saw that she was blameless--that he alone was to blame. Yet worse was
it when his closed eyelids refused to conjure up the sorrowful lovely
nightmare, and he lay like one in a trance, entombed-wretched Pagan!
feeling all that had been blindly; when the Past lay beside him like a
corpse that he had slain.

These nightly torments helped him to brave what the morning brought.
Insensibly also, as Time hardened his sufferings, Evan asked himself
what the shame of his position consisted in. He grew stiff-necked. His
Pagan virtues stood up one by one to support him. Andrew, courageously
evading the interdict that forbade him to visit Evan, would meet him
by appointment at City taverns, and flatly offered him a place in the
Brewery. Evan declined it, on the pretext that, having received Old
Tom's money for the year, he must at least work out that term according
to the conditions. Andrew fumed and sneered at Tailordom. Evan said
that there was peace in Mr. Goren's shop. His sharp senses discerned in
Andrew's sneer a certain sincerity, and he revolted against it. Mr John
Raikes, too, burlesqued Society so well, that he had the satisfaction
of laughing at his enemy occasionally. The latter gentleman was still a
pensioner, flying about town with the Countess de Saldar, in de