One thing was brought home to him, by thinking, as a matter of which he might be convinced.  No penitence could now avail him anything.  He had at any rate by this time looked sufficiently into his father’s character to be sure that he would not forgive such an offence as had been his.  Any vice, any extravagance, almost any personal neglect, would have been pardoned.  “I have so brought him up,” the father would have said, “and the fault must be counted as my own.”  But his son had deliberately expressed a wish for his father’s death, and had expressed it in his father’s presence.  He had shown not only neglect, which may arise at a distance, and may not be absolutely intentional; but these words had been said with the purpose of wounding, and were, and would be, unpardonable.  Augustus, as he went along the corridor to his father’s room, determined that he would at any rate not be penitent.

“Well, sir, how do you find yourself?” he said, walking in briskly and putting out his hand to his father.  The old man languidly gave his hand, but only smiled.  “I hear of you, though not from you, and they tell me that you have not been quite so strong of late.”

“I shall soon cease to stay and trouble you,” said the squire, with affected weakness, in a voice hardly above a whisper, using the very words which Augustus had spoken.

“There have been some moments between us, sir, which have been, unfortunately, unpleasant.”

“And yet I have done so much to make them pleasant to you!  I should have thought that the offer of all Tretton would have gone for much with you.”

Augustus was again taken in.  There was a piteous whine about his father’s voice which once more deceived him.  He did not dream of the depth of the old man’s anger.  He did not imagine that at such a moment it could boil over with such ferocity; nor was he altogether aware of the cat-like quietude with which he could pave the way for his last spring.  Mountjoy, by far the least gifted of the two, had gained the truer insight to his father’s character.

“You had done much, or rather, as I supposed, circumstances had done much.”

“Circumstances?”

“The facts, I mean, as to Mountjoy’s birth and my own.”

“I have not always left myself to be governed by actual circumstances.”

“If there was any omission on my part of an expression of proper feeling, I regret it.”

“I don’t know that there was.  What is proper feeling?  There was no hypocrisy, at any rate.”

“You sometimes are a little bitter, sir.”

“I hope you won’t find it so when I am gone.”

“I don’t know what I said that has angered you, but I may have been driven to say what I did not feel.”

“Certainly not to me.”

“I’m not here to beg pardon for any special fault, as I do not quite know of what I am accused.”

“Of nothing.  There is accusation at all.”