‘I should think he ought,’ said the squire, indignantly as he left the bank.

Thus fortified by what he considered to be the general voice of Cambridge, he returned the same evening to Babington.  Cambridge, including Mr. Caldigate, had been unanimous in believing the report.  And if the report were true, then, certainly, was his nephew innocent.  As he thought of this, some appropriate idea of the injustice of the evil done to the man and to the man’s wife came upon him.  If such were the treatment to which he and she had been subjected,—­if he, innocent, had been torn away from her and sent to the common jail, and if she, certainly innocent, had been wrongly deprived for a time of the name which he had honestly given her,—­then would it not have been right to open to her the hearts and the doors at Babington during the period of her great distress?  As he thought of this he was so melted by ruth that a tear came into each of his old eyes.  Then he remembered the attempt which had been made to catch this man for Julia—­as to which he certainly had been innocent,—­and his daughter’s continued wrath.  That a woman should be wrathful in such a matter was natural to him.  He conceived that it behoved a woman to be weak, irascible, affectionate, irrational, and soft-hearted.  When Julia would be loud in condemnation of her cousin, and would pretend to commiserate the woes of the poor wife who had been left in Australia, though he knew the source of these feelings, he could not be in the least angry with her.  But that was not at all the state of his mind in reference to his son-in-law Augustus Smirkie.  Sometimes, as he had heard Mr. Smirkie inveigh against the enormity of bigamy and of this bigamist in particular, he had determined that some ‘odd-come-shortly,’ as he would call it, he would give the vicar of Plum-cum-Pippins a moral pat on the head which should silence him for a time.  At the present moment when he got into his carriage at the station to be taken home, he was not sure whether or no he should find the vicar at Babington.  Since their marriage, Mr. Smirkie had spent much of his time at Babington, and seemed to like the Babington claret.  He would come about the middle of the week and return on the Saturday evening, in a manner which the squire could hardly reconcile with all that he had heard as to Mr. Smirkie’s exemplary conduct in his own parish.  The squire was hospitality itself, and certainly would never have said a word to make his house other than pleasant to his own girl’s husband.  But a host expects that his corns should be respected, whereas Mr. Smirkie was always treading on Mr. Babington’s toes.  Hints had been given to him as to his personal conduct which he did not take altogether in good part.  His absence from afternoon service had been alluded to, and it had been suggested to him that he ought sometimes to be more careful as to his language.  He was not, therefore ill-disposed to resent on the part of Mr. Smirkie the spirit of persecution with which that gentleman seemed to regard his nephew.  ‘Is Mr. Smirkie in the house,’ he asked the coachman.  ‘He came by the 3.40, as usual,’ said the man.  It was very much ‘as usual,’ thought the squire.