DARRELL (surprised).--"Clear? To me, I confess that if ever there were
an instance in which the Divine tenderness, the Divine justice, which I
can never presume to doubt, was yet undiscernible to my bounded vision,
it is in the instance of the very life you refer to. I see a man of
admirable virtues--of a childlike simplicity of character, which makes
him almost unconscious of the grandeur of his own soul--involved by a
sublime self-sacrifice--by a virtue, not by a fault--in the most dreadful
of human calamities--ignominious degradation;--hurled in the midday of
life from the sphere of honest men--a felon's brand on his name--a
vagrant in his age; justice at last, but tardy and niggard, and giving
him but little joy when it arrives; because, ever thinking only of
others, his heart is wrapped in a child whom he cannot make happy in the
way in which his hopes have been set!--George-no, your illustration might
be turned by a sceptic into an argument against you."

GEORGE MORLEY.--"Not unless the sceptic refused the elementary starting-
ground from which you and I may reason; not if it be granted that man has
a soul, which it is the object of this life to enrich and develop for
another. We know from my uncle what William Losely was before this
calamity befel him--a genial boon-companion--a careless, frank, 'good
fellow'--all the virtues you now praise in him dormant, unguessed even by
himself. Suddenly came CALAMITY!--suddenly arose the SOUL! Degradation
of name, and with it dignity of nature! How poor, how slight, how
insignificant William Losely the hanger-on of rural Thanes compared with
that William Waife whose entrance into this house, you--despite that
felon's brand when you knew it was the martyr's glory,--greeted with
noble reverence; whom, when the mind itself was stricken down--only the
soul left to the wreck of the body--you tended with such pious care as he
lay on--your father's bed! And do you, who hold Nobleness in such
honour--do you, of all men, tell me that you cannot recognise that