your other bets as in those about the Clerkland," suggested one of his
sporting friends.

This last sneer and insinuation was too much, and it galled the proud
man to the quick to hear the laugh of scorn which followed it. He
turned round, seized his cap, and flinging at Kennedy a look of intense
and concentrated hatred, left the hall, and rushed up to his rooms.

To do Brogten justice, he had never intended for a moment to affect
Julian's chance of ultimate success, when he enjoyed the mean
satisfaction of screwing up his door. He had regarded him with indeed
dislike, which received a tinge of deeper intensity from the envy, and
even admiration, with which it was largely mingled. But although he had
calculated that his trick might be more telling and offensive if done at
this particular opportunity, and although he had quite sufficient grudge
against his former school-fellow to wish him a deep annoyance, yet he
would never have dreamed of wilfully thwarting his most cherished aims,
or materially affecting his prospects and position. So vile a malice
would have been intolerable to any one, and the thought of it was
thoroughly intolerable to Brogten, in whom all gleams of honourable
feeling were by no means extinguished, however dormant they might seem.
It had never entered into his thoughts to anticipate the violent
consequences which his act had produced; and when told of Julian's
passion and suffering, he had felt such real remorse that he had even
half intended to wait for him as he went to hall, and there, (in a
quasi-public manner, since some men were sure to be standing about on
the hall steps), to endure the mortification of expressing his regret to
the man whom he had chosen to treat as his enemy. But when he found
himself cut and jeered at--when he was even met by the suggestion that
he had intended basely to serve his own pecuniary interests at Julian's
expense--a method of swindling which he had never for one instant
contemplated--all his softer and better feelings vanished at once, and
created a brutal hardness in his heart, which now once more he was
striving in solitude to mollify or remove.

And he succeeded so far that, while brooding savagely over the venomous
shafts of sarcasm and ridicule with which Kennedy had wounded him, he
gradually softened his feelings towards Julian, by transferring them in
tenfold virulence against Julian's nearest friend. Home and he had been
school-fellows after all,