sympathize with the wilder and more enterprising order of spirits; and
Walter had been at no loss for secret excuses wherewith to defend the
irregular life and reckless habits of his parent. Amidst all his father's
evident and utter want of principle, Walter clung with a natural and
self-deceptive partiality to the few traits of courage or generosity
which relieved, if they did not redeem, his character; traits which, with
a character of that stamp, are so often, though always so unprofitably
blended, and which generally cease with the commencement of age. He now
felt elated by the conviction, as he had always been inspired by the
hope, that it was to be his lot to discover one whom he still believed
living, and whom he trusted to find amended. The same intimate persuasion
of the "good luck" of Geoffrey Lester, which all who had known him
appeared to entertain, was felt even in a more credulous and earnest
degree by his son. Walter gave way now, indeed, to a variety of
conjectures as to the motives which could have induced his father to
persist in the concealment of his fate after his return to England; but
such of those conjectures as, if the more rational, were also the more
despondent, he speedily and resolutely dismissed. Sometimes he thought
that his father, on learning the death of the wife he had abandoned,
might have been possessed with a remorse which rendered him unwilling to
disclose himself to the rest of his family, and a feeling that the main
tie of home was broken; sometimes he thought that the wanderer had been
disappointed in his expected legacy, and dreading the attacks of his
creditors, or unwilling to throw himself once more on the generosity of
his brother, had again suddenly quitted England and entered on some
enterprise or occupation abroad. It was also possible, to one so reckless
and changeful, that even, after receiving the legacy, a proposition from
some wild comrade might have hurried him away on any continental project
on the mere impulse of the moment, for the impulse of the moment had
always been the guide of his life; and once abroad he might have returned