was offered Westmacott by the circumstance that his sister seemed nowise
taken with Sir Rowland. She suffered him because he was her brother's
friend; on that account she even honoured him with some measure of her
own friendship; but to no greater intimacy did her manner promise to
admit him. And meanwhile, Mr. Wilding persisted in the face of all
rebuffs. Under his smiling mask he hid the smart of the wounds she
dealt him, until it almost seemed to him that from loving her he had
come to hate her.

It had been well for Richard had he left things as they were and waited.
Whether Blake prospered or not, leastways it was clear that Wilding
would not prosper, and that, for the season, was all that need have
mattered to young Richard.

But in his cups that night he had thought in some dim way to precipitate
matters by affronting Mr. Wilding, secure, as I have shown, in his
belief that Wilding would perish sooner than raise a finger against
Ruth's brother. And his drunken astuteness, it seemed, had been to his
mind as a piece of bottle glass to the sight, distorting the image
viewed through it.

With some such bitter reflection rode he home to his sleepless couch.
Some part of those dark hours he spent in bitter reviling of Wilding,
of himself, and even of his sister, whom he blamed for this awful
situation into which he had tumbled; at other times he wept from
self-pity and sheer fright.

Once, indeed, he imagined that he saw light, that he saw a way out
of the peril that hemmed him in. His mind turned for a moment in
the direction that Trenchard had feared it might. He bethought him of