one's own sins never look so bad in our eyes as the same sins when
committed by another. He argued that he would really be applying the
money as his father intended, viz, to such purposes as should most
advance the objects of his university career. He was committing a sin
to save himself from temptation.

The near approach of the scholarship examination, and Kennedy's failure
at Christmas, made his father all the more ready to give him every
possible advantage that money could procure. Ignorant of the fact that
to "read double" with a tutor was almost a thing unprecedented at
Camford, and that to do so, _both_ in classics and mathematics, was a
thing wholly unknown, and indeed practically impossible, Mr Kennedy was
only delighted at Edward's letter, as conveying a proof of his extreme
and laudable eagerness to recover lost ground, and do his best. He very
readily wrote the cheque for the sum required, and praised his son
liberally for these indications of effort. How those praises cut
Kennedy to the heart.

But he at once spent the money in the way which he had devised, and
added thereby a new load of mental bitterness to the heavy weight which
already oppressed him. The sum thus appropriated greatly lightened,
although it did not remove, the pecuniary obligations which he had
contracted at cards or in other ways to his set of "fast" companions;
but it was at the cost of his peace of mind.

Externally he profited by the transaction. He was enabled in great
measure, without the charge of meanness, to drop the most undesirable of
his acquaintances, and awaking eagerly to the hope of at once redeeming
his reputation and lessening his difficulties by gaining a scholarship,
he began, for the first time since he had entered Saint Werner's, to
work steadily with all his might.

He seemed to be living two lives in one, and often asked himself whether
there was in his character some deeply-rooted hypocrisy. With Julian
and Owen, and the men who resembled them, he could talk nobly of all
that was honourable, and he powerfully upheld a chivalrous ideal of duty
and virtue. And as his face lighted up, and the thoughts flowed in the
full stream of eloquent language in reprobation of some mean act, or in
glowing eulogium of some recorded heroism for the performance of what
was right, who would have fancied, who would have believed, that
Kennedy's own life had failed so egregiously in the commonest
requirements of steadfa