Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and sneering in Raffles’ manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words upon him.  But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be permanently counted on with this man.  It was inevitable that he should wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be regarded as lying outside the divine plan.  The spirit of evil might have sent him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode’s subversion as an instrument of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a chastisement of a new kind.  It was an hour of anguish for him very different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were pardoned and his services accepted.  Those misdeeds even when committed—­had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the divine scheme?  And was he after all to become a mere stone of stumbling and a rock of offence?  For who would understand the work within him?  Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had espoused, in one heap of obloquy?

In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode’s mind clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman ends.  But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth’s orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.  And now within all the automatic succession of theoretic phrases—­ distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbors and of his own wife.  For the pain, as well as the public estimate of disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession.  To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner’s dock is disgrace.  But Mr. Bulstrode had aimed at being an eminent Christian.

It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again reached Stone Court.  The fine old place never looked more like a delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were in flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew, were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all around had a heart of peace within them.  But everything was spoiled for the owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited the descent of Mr. Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.

It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscoted parlor over their tea and toast, which was as much as Raffles cared to take at that early hour.  The difference between his morning and evening self was not so great as his companion had imagined that it might be; the delight in tormenting was perhaps even the stronger because his spirits were rather less highly pitched.  Certainly his manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light.